Second String Part 34

"Yes, if Sally consents." She turned round to him. "Do you know what it is to see somebody asking for help?"

"To me they always call it temporary a.s.sistance."

"Yes. Well, I think I saw that to-night." She was silent a minute, then she gurgled. "And really they're all great fun, you know."

"I look forward to our stay at Meriton with the gravest apprehension,"

said Billy Foot.

The Nun looked at him, smiled, looked away, looked back once more.

"Well, I shall have nothing else to do--in the way of recreation," she said.

A long silence followed. Billy threw away the stump of his cigar.

"Hang it, he's got the style, that fellow has!"

"Who's got what style?" asked the Nun. Her voice sounded drowsy.

"What the House likes--Andy."

"What house?" drawled the Nun, terribly and happily sleepy.

"Oh, you're a lively girl to drive home with in a motor at night!"

Her eyes were closed, her lips ever so little parted. Half asleep, still she smiled. He made a trumpet of his hands and shouted into her ear.

"The House of Commons, stupid!"

"Don't tickle my ear," said the Nun. "And try if you can't be quiet!"

Chapter XV.

LOVE AND FEAR.

Well might Harry Belfield be subject to fits of temper and impatience!

Well might he show signs of wear and tear not to be accounted for by the labours of a mild political campaign, carried on under circ.u.mstances of great amenity! He had fallen into a state of feeling which forbade peace within, and made security from without impossible. He was terribly at war in his soul. If he could have put the case so simply as that, being pledged to one girl, he had fallen in love with another, he would have had a plain solution open to him: he could break the engagement, facing the pain that he gave and the discredit that he suffered. His feelings admitted of no such straightforward remedy. The beliefs and the aspirations with which he had wooed Vivien were not dead; they were struggling for life against their old and mighty enemy. For him Vivien still meant happiness, and more than happiness--a haven for anything that was good in him, a refuge from all that was bad. With all his instincts of pure affection, of loyalty and chivalry, still he loved her and clung to her. She it was still who had power to comfort and soothe him, to send him forth able to do his work again. She was the best thing in his life; she seemed to him well-nigh his only chance against himself. Was he to throw the last chance away?

Then why not be true? Why deceive when he loved? Every day, nay, every hour, that question had to be asked in scorn and answered in bitterness.

His happiness lay with one; the present desire of his eyes was for another. His mind towards Isobel was strange: often he hardly liked her; sometimes his hatred for what she was doing to his life made him almost hate her; always his pa.s.sion for her was strong and compelling. Since the stolen kiss had set it aflame, it had spread and spread through him, fed by their secret interviews, till it seemed now to consume all his being in one fierce blaze. How could affectionate and loyal instincts stand against it? Yet he hated it. All the good of his nature his kindliness, his amiability, his chivalry--hated it. He was become as it were two men; and the one reviled the other. But when he reviled the pa.s.sion in him as the murderer of all his happiness, it answered with a fell insinuation. Why these heroics and this despair? Why talk of happiness being murdered? There was another way. "Don't murder happiness for me," pa.s.sion urged slyly. "I am violent, but I am a pa.s.sing thing.

You know how often I have come to you, and raged, and pa.s.sed by. There's another way." That whisper was ever in his ears, and would not be silenced. That it might gain its end, his pa.s.sion subtly minimized itself; it sought to enter into an unnatural alliance with his better part; it prayed in aid his purer love, his tottering loyalty, his old-time chivalry. A permanent reconciliation with these it could not, and dared not, ask; but a _modus vivendi_ till it, transitory thing as it was, should pa.s.s away? So the tempter tempted with all his cunning.

Avoiding plain words for what that way was, he was seduced into asking whether it were open. He could not answer. Through all the stolen interviews, through other stolen kisses, he had never come to the knowledge of Isobel's heart and mind. He could read no more than she chose to let him read. She allowed his flirtation and his kisses, but almost scornfully. When he declared his state to be intolerable, she told him it was easy to end it--easy to end either the engagement or the flirtation at his option. She had not owned to love. A certain sour amus.e.m.e.nt seemed to lie for her in the affair. "We're a pair of fools,"

her eyes seemed to say when he embraced her, "but it doesn't much matter; nothing can come of it, and it'll soon be all over." When he saw that look, his old desire for conquest came over him; he was impelled at any cost to break down this indifference, to make his sway complete. Of her relations towards Wellgood she had flatly refused to say another word. "The less we talk about that just now the better." In some such phrase she always forbade the topic. There again he was left in an uncertainty which stung his pride and bred a fierce jealousy. By what she gave and what she withheld, by her silence no less than by her words, she inflamed his pa.s.sion. She yielded enough to fill him with desire and hope of a full triumph; but even though she yielded, though her voice might falter and her eyes drop, she did not own love's mastery yet.

Thus torn and rent within, from without he seemed ringed round with enemies. Eyes that must needs be watchful were all about him. There was Andy Hayes with his chance knowledge of the first false step; Wellgood, who must have a jealous vigilance for the woman whom he had at least thought of making his wife; his own father, with his shrewd estimate of his son and acquaintance with past histories; Vivien herself, to whom he must still play devoted lover, with whom most spare hours must still be spent. To add to all these, now there came this girl from London! She had knowledge of past histories too; she had the sharpest of eyes; he feared even the directness of her tongue. Andy had seen, but not spoken; he did not trust Doris, if she saw, not to speak. He was terribly afraid of her. Small wonder that the suggestion of her stay at the Lion had called forth no enthusiasm from him! She took rank as an enemy the more.

And Billy Foot was to be at Halton! She and Billy would lay their heads together and talk. Out of talk would come suspicion, out of suspicion more watchfulness. It was no business of theirs, but they would watch.

Political campaigning amidst all this! Well, in part it was a relief.

The speeches and their preparation perforce occupied his mind for the time; on his platforms he forgot. Yet to go away--to leave Nutley for so many hours--seemed to his overwrought fancy a sore danger. What might happen while he was away? To what state of things might he any evening come back? Vivien might have revealed suspicions to Wellgood, or Wellgood might have challenged Isobel and compelled an answer. Once when Andy did not come to the meeting, he made sure that he had stayed behind on purpose to reveal his knowledge to Vivien or her father, and the evening was a long torture which no speeches could deaden, no applause allay.

In this fever of conflict and of fear his days pa.s.sed. At this cost he bought the joy of the stolen interviews--that joy so mixed with doubt, so tainted by pain, so a.s.sailed by remorse. Yet for him so tense, so keen, so surcharged with the great primitive struggle. Ten minutes stolen once a day--it seldom came to more than that. Now and then, when he had no political excursion, a second ten, late at night, after his ostensible departure from Nutley. When he had "gone home," when Vivien had been sent to bed, and Wellgood had repaired to his pipe in the study, Isobel would chance to wander down the drive, looking into the waters of the lake, and he, lingering by the gate, see her and come back. Whether she would saunter out or not he never knew. Waiting to see whether she would seemed waiting for the fate of a lifetime.

One night--a week after the Fyfold Green meeting, a day after the Nun had taken possession of her quarters at the Lion--Harry had dined at Nutley and--gone home.

Isobel stole stealthily out; she had a quarter of an hour before doors would be locked. She strolled down the drive, a long dark cloak hiding the white dress which would have shown too conspicuously. As she went she dropped a letter; coming back she would pick it up. If any one asked why she had come out, the answer was--to find that letter, accidentally dropped. There had never been need of the excuse yet; it was still available.

Harry came swiftly, yet warily, back from the gate. For a fleeting instant all his being seemed satisfied. But she stretched out her arms, holding him off.

"No, I want to say something, Harry. This--this has gone on long enough.

To-morrow I want you to know--only Miss Vintry!" There was the break in her voice; it was too dark to see her eyes.

"That's impossible," he answered, very low.

"Everything else is impossible, you mean." Her voice faltered again--into a tenderness new to him, filling him with rapture. "You're dying of it, poor boy! End it, Harry! I watched you to-night. Oh, you're tired to death--do you ever sleep? End it, Harry--because I can't."

So she had broken at last, her long fencing ended, her strong composure gone. "I can't bear it for you any longer. Have the strength. Go back to--" She broke into tremulous laughter. "Go back to duty, Harry--and forget this nonsense."

"Come to me, Isobel!"

"No, I daren't. From to-morrow there is--nothing."

He caught the arms that would have defended her face. "You love me?"

Her smile was piteous. "Not after to-night!"

His triumph rose on the crest of pa.s.sion. "Ah, you do!" He kissed her.

"That's good-bye," she said. "I shall go through it all right, Harry.

You'll see no signs. Or would you rather I went away?"

"What made you tell me you loved me to-night?"

"So many things are tormenting you, poor boy! Must I go on doing it? Oh, I have done it, I know. It was my self-defence. Now my self-defence must be forgetfulness." The clock over the stables struck a quarter past ten.

"I must go back. I've told you."

"Do you see Wellgood before you go to bed?"

"Yes, always."

"What happens?"

"Don't, don't, Harry! What does it matter?"

"Are you going to marry him?"