Second String Part 42

"She's gone out with her father, I'm afraid. That's how I happen to be off duty."

"And able to cry?"

"Oh, I hope you'll forget that nonsense. I'm quite resigned to everything, really." She too rose, smiling at her companion. "Only I rather wish it was all over--and the plunge made!"

The Nun reported the fact of her interview--and the results, such as they were--to Miss Dutton when she returned home.

"Her crying shows that she doesn't think she's got much chance," said the Nun hopefully.

"It shows she'd take a chance, if she got one," Miss Dutton opined acutely.

"You mean it all depends on Harry, then?"

"In my opinion it always has."

That indeed seemed the net result. It all depended on Harry--not at first sight a very satisfactory conclusion for those who knew Harry.

However, Andy, who came into the Lion later in the afternoon, was hopeful--nay, confident. He had mysterious reasons for this frame of mind--information which he declared himself unable to disclose; he could not even indicate the source from which it proceeded, but he might say that there were two sources. He really could not say more--which annoyed the Nun extremely.

"But I think we may consider all the trouble over," he ended.

For had not Harry, when he got his note, dealt quite frankly with Andy--well, with very considerable frankness as to the past, with complete as to the future? He admitted that he had "more or less made a fool of himself," but declared that it had been mere nonsense, and was altogether over. Absolutely done with! He gave Andy his hand on that, begged his pardon for having been sulky with him, and told him that henceforward all his thoughts would be where his heart had been all through--with Vivien. If Isobel had convinced Andy, Harry convinced him ten times more. Andy had such a habit of believing people. He was not, indeed, easily or stupidly deceived by a wilful liar; but he fell a victim to people who believed in themselves, who thought they were telling the truth. It was so hard for him to understand that people would not go on feeling and meaning what they were sincerely feeling and meaning at the moment. They could convince him, if only they were convinced themselves.

"Let's think no more about it, and then we can all be happy," he said to the Nun. It really made a great difference to his happiness how Harry was behaving.

After all, it was rather hard--and rather hard-hearted--not to believe in Harry, when Harry believed so thoroughly in himself. The strongest proof of his regained self-confidence was the visit he paid to the Nun--a visit long overdue in friends.h.i.+p and even in courtesy. Harry asked for no forgiveness; he seemed to a.s.sume that she would understand how, having been troubled in his mind of late, he had not been in the mood for visits. He was quite his old self when he came, so much his old self that he scarcely cared to disguise the fact that he had given some cause for anxiety--any more than he expected to be met with doubt when he implied that all cause for anxiety was past. He had quite got over that attack, and his const.i.tution was really the stronger for it.

Illnesses are nature's curative processes, so the doctors tell us. Harry was always more virtuous after a moral seizure. The seizure being the effective cause of his improvement, he could not be expected to regard it with unmixed regret. If, incidentally, it witnessed to his conquering charms, he could not help that. Of course he would not talk about the thing; he did not so much mind other people implying, a.s.suming, or hinting at it.

If the Nun obliged him at all in this way, she chose the difficult method of irony--in which not her greatest admirer could claim that she was very subtle.

"My dear Harry, I quite understand your not calling. How could you think of me when you were quite wrapped up in Vivien Wellgood? I was really glad!"

Now that Harry had come, he found himself delighted with his visit.

"Country air's agreeing with you, Doris. You look splendid." His eyes spoke undisguised admiration.

"Thank you, Harry. I know you thought me good-looking once." The Nun was meek and grateful.

Harry laughed, by no means resenting the allusion. That had been an illness, a curative process, also--though her curative measures had been rather too summary for his taste.

"Whose peace of mind are you destroying down here?"

"I've a right to destroy peace of mind if I want to. It's not as if I were engaged to be married--as you are. I think Jack Rock's in most danger--or perhaps your father."

"The pater inherits some of my weaknesses," said Harry. "Or shares my tastes, anyhow."

"Yes, I know he's devoted to Vivien."

"You never look prettier than when you're trying to say nasty things."

"I'll stop, or in another moment you'll be offering to kiss me."

"Should you object?"

"Hardly worth while. It would mean nothing at all to either of us.

Still--I'm not a poacher."

"You don't seem to me to be able to take a joke either." Harry's voice sounded annoyed. "But we won't quarrel. I've been through one of my fits of the blues, Doris. Don't be hard on a fellow."

"It would be so much better for you if people could be hard on you, Harry. Still you'll have to pay for it somehow. We all have to pay for being what we are--somehow. Perhaps you won't know you're paying--you'll call it by some other name; perhaps you won't care. But you'll have to pay somehow."

The Nun made a queer figure of a moralist; she was really far too pretty. But her words got home to Harry--the new, the recovered, Harry.

"I have paid," he said. "Oh yes, you don't believe it, but I have! The bill's paid, and receipted. I'm starting fair now. But you never did do me justice."

"I've always done justice to what you care most about--Harry the Irresistible!"

"Oh, stop that rot!" he implored. "I'm serious, you know, Doris."

"I know all the symptoms of your seriousness. The first is wanting to flirt with somebody fresh."

Harry's laugh was vexed--but not of bitter vexation. "Give a fellow a chance!"

"The whole world's in league to do it--again and again!"

"This time the world is going to find me appreciative. You don't know what a splendid girl Vivien is! If you did, you'd understand how--how--well, how things look different."

The Nun relented. "I really think it may last you over the wedding--and perhaps the honeymoon," she said.

The extraordinary thing to her--indeed to all his friends who did not share his most mercurial temperament--was that this change of mood was entirely sincere in Harry, and his satisfaction with it not less genuine. For two painful hours--from his receipt of Isobel's note to his dispatching of that sentence about being bored with politics--he had struggled, keeping Andy in an adjoining room solaced by newspapers and tobacco, in case counsel should be needed. Then the right had won--and all was over! When all was over, it was with Harry exactly as if nothing had ever begun; his belief in the virtue of penitence beggared theology itself. What he had been doing presented itself as not merely finished, not merely repented of, but as hardly real; at the most as an aberration, at the least as a delusion. Certainly he felt hardly responsible for it. An excellent comfortable doctrine--for Harry. It rather left out of account the other party to the transaction.

What a right he had to be proud of his return to loyalty! Because Isobel Vintry was really a most attractive girl; it would be unjust and ungrateful to deny that, since she had--well, it was better not to go back to that! With which reflection he went back to it, recovering some of the emotions of that culminating evening in the drive; recovering them not to any dangerous extent--Isobel was not there, the thrill of her voice not in his ears, nor the light of her eyes visible through the darkness--but enough to make him pat his virtue on the back again, and again excuse the aberration. Oh, they had all made too much of it! A mere flirtation! Oh, very wrong! Yes, yes; or where lay the marvel of this repentance? But not so bad as all that! They had been prejudiced to think it so serious--prejudiced by Vivien's charms, her trust, her simplicity, her appeal. Yes, he certainly had been a villain even to flirt when engaged to a girl like that. However he thoroughly appreciated that aspect of the case now; it had needed this little--adventure--to make him appreciate it. Perhaps it had all been for the best. Well, that was going too far, because Isobel felt it deeply, as her words in the drive had shown. Yet perhaps--Harry achieved his climax in the thought that even for her it might have been for the best if it stopped her from marrying Wellgood. By how different a path, in how different a mood, had poor Isobel attained to laying the same unction to her smarting soul!

Wellgood did not know at all how quickly matters had moved. He was still asking about the sin--the aberration; he was not up to date with Isobel's renunciation or Harry's comfortable penitence. Nor was he of the school that accepts such things without sound proof. "Lead us not into temptation" was all very well in church; in secular life, if you suspected a servant of dishonesty, you marked a florin and left it on the mantelpiece. Had Isobel been already his wife, he would have locked her up in the nearest approach to a tower of bra.s.s that modern conditions permit; if Vivien had been already Harry's wife, he would no doubt have been in favour of Harry's being kept out of the way of dangerous seductions. But now, whether as father or as lover--and the father continued to afford the lover most valuable aid, most specious cover--he had first to know, to test, and to try. He had to leave his marked florin on the mantelpiece.

It must not, however, be supposed that Meriton lacked problems because Harry Belfield seemed, for the moment at all events, to cease to present one. For days past Billy Foot had been grappling with a most momentous one, and Mrs. Belfield's mind was occupied, and almost disturbed, by another of equal gravity. Curiously enough, the two related to the same person, and were to some degree of a kindred nature. Both involved the serious question of the social status--or perhaps the social desirability would be a better term--of Miss Doris Flower.

In the leisure hours and the autumn suns.h.i.+ne of Meriton--an atmosphere remote from courts, whether of law or of royalty, and inimical to ambition--Billy was in danger of forgetting the paramount claims of his career and of remembering only the remarkable prettiness of Miss Flower.

He was once more "on the brink"; the metaphor of a plunge found a place in his thoughts as well as in Isobel Vintry's; some metaphors are very maids-of-all-work. He was deplorably perturbed. Now that the great campaign was over he abandoned himself to the great question. He even went up to London to talk it over with Gilly, entertaining his brother to lunch--by no means a casual or haphazard hospitality, for Gilly's meals were serious business--in order to obtain his most inspired counsel. But Gilly had been abominably, nay, cruelly disappointing.

"I shouldn't waste any more time thinking about that, old chap," said Gilly, delicately dissecting a young partridge.

"You're not going out of your way to be flattering. It appears to me at least to be a matter of some importance whom I marry. I thought perhaps my brother might take that view too."

"Oh, I do, old chap. I know it's devilish important to you. All I mean is that in this particular case you needn't go about weighing the question. Ask the Nun right off."

"You really advise it?" Billy demanded, wrinkling his brow in judicial gravity, but inwardly rather delighted.

"I do," Gilly rejoined. "Ask her right off--get it off your mind! It doesn't matter a hang, because she's sure to refuse you." He smiled at his brother across the table--a table spread by that brother's bounty--in a fat and comfortable fas.h.i.+on.