To Love Part 29

"Well, hang it all, Maria, what do you want me to do? Go upstairs and turn the gents out?"

"We'll see," said Mrs. Carew darkly. She grabbed up the tea-tray and made for the door. "To-morrow I shall tell her it is not to happen again."

"All right, you tell her," her husband muttered behind her retreating back. "Can't think, though, why you don't leave the girls alone. However they start it always ends that way. You and I have seen quite a number take to the streets, and you don't do much to prevent them short of grumbling at them."

"They shan't do it in my house," reiterated Mrs. Carew; she stumped in dignified protest from the room, and upstairs to the offender's attic.

The first guest had already arrived, so Mrs. Carew could not voice her disapproval; she expressed it, however, in a glare which she directed towards him, and the noise with which she dumped down the tea-tray. The room was full of flowers, which did not add to her approval; she detected in them a sure sign of immorality. Great, beautiful red roses, nodding from every vase, filling the air with their rather heavy scent.

The visitor also inspired her with a sense of distrust. He looked what Mrs. Carew described as "a man about town." She had been fond of Joan; behind her anger lay a small hurt sense of pity; she was too nice a young lady to go the way of the others.

She opened the door to d.i.c.k a little later with a sour face, and she did not even trouble to take him upstairs.

"Miss Rutherford is high up as you can get"--she jerked her thumb upwards--"it's the only door on the landing, you can't mistake it."

With that she left him, and d.i.c.k found his own way upstairs. He had stayed away all day till the exact hour he had named, with some difficulty, but with a punctilious sense of doing right. Joan had not answered his letter and he looked upon her silence as an admission that she loved him, but there were a great many things between them that would have to be talked over first coldly and sensibly. He had thought the matter out and he had decided that he would not leave it all to her, to tell or not to tell as she thought best, which had been his first idea. He would help her by telling her that he had always known, and that it made no difference. He wanted to make her confession as easy as possible.

It was not until after he had knocked that he realized with a shock of disappointment that Joan was not alone. He could hear her talking to somebody, then she moved across the room and pulled the door open. He saw only her first of all, his eyes sought hers and stayed there. He could notice that she seemed very pale, and almost frightened looking, and that she had dressed for the afternoon in black. Some long clinging stuff, and up near where the blouse opened at the neck she had pinned in one red rose, its warm and velvety petals lying against the white of her neck. The room seemed full of the scent of the roses too, and a little oppressive. d.i.c.k held his breath as he looked at her; to him she seemed so beautiful as to be almost amazing; then he came a little further into the room and his eyes took in the other occupant. A man sat, or rather lounged, on the sofa, pulled up under the window. He was watching the meeting with curious eyes, and in his hands he held another rose, the same sort as the one Joan wore. When d.i.c.k's eyes met his, he smiled, and laying the rose aside, stood up.

"Did not know it was to be a tea-party, Pierrette," he said, "you ought to have warned me."

Joan had shut the door and moved forward into the centre of the room.

She was evidently very nervous over something; Landon was more than a little amused, though also inclined to be annoyed.

"Oh, it isn't a tea-party," she was saying. "It's just us three. Doctor Grant, this is Mr. Landon. Will you have this chair?--it is really the only one which is quite safe to sit on."

d.i.c.k took the proffered chair stiffly; he was conscious of a bitter sense of disappointment, tinged with disapproval. It was, of course, different for himself, but he loathed to see the other man so much at home in this quaint little dust-laden attic where Joan lived. Her bed stood against the wall, a black counterpane of sorts thrown across it; her brush and comb, the little silver things for her dressing-table were scattered about on the top of the chest of drawers standing near. The place would have been sacred to him; but how did this other man look at it? And why had Joan asked him? Was it a deliberate attempt to s.h.i.+eld herself from something she dreaded? or did it mean that, after all, she had only been playing with him--that the fluttered surrender of her lips had been but a flirt's last fling in the game of pa.s.sion? If a man is really very much in love, as was d.i.c.k, and something occurs to make him lose his temper, it is sure to end in rapid and sometimes lasting disaster. After the first five minutes d.i.c.k made no attempt even to be polite to Landon. Rage, blind, merciless rage, and a sense of having made a d.a.m.ned fool of himself, throbbed in his mind as he watched Joan talking to the other man, and saw the evident familiarity which lay between them. Yet he could not get up and go away; he would not leave her, not till he had hurt her as much as she was now hurting him.

For Landon, the amus.e.m.e.nt of baiting the other man's evident misery soon palled. He was a little annoyed himself that Joan should have seen fit to drag him in as such a cat's-paw, for a very few minutes of their threesome had shown him what his part was intended to be. It meant in addition that the girl had fooled him, and that he had wasted his background of red roses. It was all very annoying and a very stupid way of spending the afternoon, for no one could imagine that there was any amus.e.m.e.nt to be got out of a bad tea in squalid surroundings--thus mercilessly but almost truthfully did he dismiss the atmosphere of Joan's attic--with a girl palpably in love with someone else. Landon rose presently with his most languid air of boredom.

"Sorry, Pierrette," he said; "must fly, but I leave my roses behind me as a memory. They are not what I should call my lucky flower." He turned to d.i.c.k, who stood up with a grim face and stern-set mouth. "Good-bye, Doctor Grant; delighted to have met you: if Pierrette feels like it, get her to tell you about our last venture into the rose world. Romantic tale, isn't it, Pierrette?" He laughed, lifting her hand to his heart very impressively. "But ours has always been a romance, hasn't it? That is why we christened each other Pierrot and Pierrette." He let go her hand and bowed gravely. Joan followed him to the door. "I'll come and see you out," she said; she had not realized until the moment came how horribly afraid she was of d.i.c.k. "You might lose your way."

"Oh no," Landon a.s.sured her; he shot one last slightly vindictive glance at d.i.c.k; "I know it by heart." Then he laughed and went from the room, shutting the door behind him.

Joan stayed where she was, a seeming weight on her lids, which prevented her lifting her eyes to look at d.i.c.k. But she was intensely conscious of him, and round her heart something had closed like a band of iron. At last, since he said nothing and made no sign, she moved forward blindly and sat down in the nearest chair.

"Aren't you ever going to speak again?" she whispered.

Her words shook d.i.c.k out of his silent self-restraint. Hot anger, pa.s.sionate reproaches, fought for speech in his throat; he drove them back.

"Is this your answer to my question?" he said finally. "It would have been simpler to have put it some other way. But you may at least congratulate yourself on having succeeded. You have killed something that I had thought to be almost eternal." He drew in his breath sharply, but pa.s.sion was shaking him now, it had to have its say. "I have loved you," he went on hoa.r.s.ely, "ever since I first saw you. Common sense has argued against you; pride has fought to throw you out of my life; but against everything your face has lived triumphant. I don't know why G.o.d makes us feel like that for women of your stamp, why we should bring such great ideals to so poor a shrine. I am talking arrant nonsense, just raving at you, you think, and I sound rather absurd even to myself.

Only--my G.o.d! you don't know what you have done--you have broken my faith in you; it was the strongest, the best thing in my life."

Joan crouched down in the chair; she seemed to be trying to get as far away from his voice as possible; she sat with her head buried in her arms.

"I built up a dream about you two years ago," d.i.c.k went on. "You don't remember anything about me; but our meeting, your face as you stood that day with your back to the wall, were stamped on my heart as with a branding-iron. Of all the foolish things that a man could do perhaps I chose the worst; for ever as I stood and watched you the shadow of shame grew up beside you, and other people turned away from you. But I thought I saw further than the rest; I imagined that I had seen through your eyes, because already I loved them, into your soul. There is some mistake here, I argued, some mystery which she herself shall one day make clear to me." Joan had lifted her head and was staring at him.

"From that day I started building my dream. I went abroad, but the memory of your face went with me; I used to make love to other women, but it was because I looked for you in their eyes. Then I came home and I saw you again. Suddenly my dream crystallized into clear, unshakable fact; I loved, I had always loved you; nothing that other people could say against you would have any effect. It lay just with you, and to-day you have given me your answer and broken with your own hand the dream."

He turned towards the door; Joan staggered to her feet and ran to him.

The vague memory in her mind had leapt to life; his eyes had often reminded her of someone. She remembered now that he was the young doctor that Aunt Janet had sent for. She remembered her own defiance as she had faced him and the pity in his eyes.

"d.i.c.k," she whispered, "d.i.c.k, I didn't know, I didn't understand. I thought--oh, don't go away and leave me just like this, I might explain." Her torrent of words broke down before the look on his face; she fell to her knees, clutching at his hands. "Won't you listen? It was because I was afraid to tell you; I was afraid, afraid."

Her position, the paroxysm of tears which, once they came, she could in no way stop, disquieted him. He shook her hands from him. "And because you were afraid," he said stiffly, "I suppose you had the other man here to protect you." Then his mood changed.

"Whatever you have done," he said, "it isn't any business of mine.

Please forgive me for ranting like a schoolmaster, and please don't cry like that. While I sat there watching that other man and feeling that everything my heart had been set on was falling to pieces all round me, I wanted to hurt you back again. It's a pugnacious sensation that one gets sometimes, but it's gone now; I don't want you to be hurt. It was not your fault that I lifted you up in my heart like that; it is not altogether your fault that you have fallen. Perhaps you did not know how cruel you were being when you had that other man here to make clear to me something you did not wish to put into words yourself. I have said some beastly things to you, and I am sorry for them. Please don't let them worry you for long."

Then he had gone, before she had time to speak or lift her hands to hold him. Gone, and as she crouched against the door the sound of his feet trod into her heart, each step a throb of agony.

Mrs. Carew was holding forth to f.a.n.n.y in the hall as d.i.c.k swung past them. He did not glance at them even, and f.a.n.n.y did not have a chance to call out to him, he went so rapidly, slamming the door behind him.

"Not as how they haven't left at seasonable hours," Mrs. Carew went rambling on; "but I 'as always said and always will say, I don't hold with such doings in my house."

"What doings?" f.a.n.n.y expostulated. "For goodness, old Carew, do try and make yourself more clear; who has been carrying on and how?"

"Miss Rutherford," Mrs. Carew announced. She was viewing f.a.n.n.y with unfriendly suspicion. "Only came back from this 'ere theatrical show yesterday, and to-day she has two men to tea with her in her bedroom."

"Two men?" repeated f.a.n.n.y. "Did you know they were coming?"

"Ask them," snorted Mrs. Carew. "And what I said is----"

"Oh, run away, Carew," f.a.n.n.y broke in, "with your nasty suspicion. It's all my bad example, you'll be saying next. Bring up some tea for me, there's an old dear; I'm fairly parched for a drink."

But before she went into her own room f.a.n.n.y ran upstairs and knocked softly oh Joan's door. There was no answer and no sound from within the room; yet when she tried turning the handle, and pus.h.i.+ng her foot against the door, it was to find it locked. What did it all mean? Two men to tea, d.i.c.k's face as he had pa.s.sed through the hall, and Joan's locked door? That was a problem which f.a.n.n.y set herself to disentangle in her own particular way.

CHAPTER XXVI

"Of all strange things in this strange new world Most strange is this; Ever my lips must speak and smile Without your kiss.

Ever mine eyes must see, despite Those eyes they miss."

F. HEASLIP LEE.

How Joan lived through the hours that followed she never knew. Heart and brain seemed paralysed; things had lost their power to hurt. When f.a.n.n.y crept upstairs in the early morning and knocked timidly at the door, Joan opened it to her. She had no wish to see f.a.n.n.y; she did not want to talk about yesterday, or explain what had happened; but vaguely through her absolute misery she realized that life had still to be gone on with, and that f.a.n.n.y was one of the items of life which it was no use trying to disregard. As a matter of fact, until she opened the door and caught f.a.n.n.y's look of dismay, she did not remember that she was still in her black afternoon frock, nor the fact that she had spent most of the night crouched against the door as d.i.c.k had left her.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" f.a.n.n.y whispered; she came quickly into the room and threw warm, loving arms round Joan. "You haven't been to bed at all; why didn't you let me in last night? I'd have helped you somehow or other."

Joan stood limply in the embrace, but she did not turn and cling to f.a.n.n.y, or weep as the other girl rather wished she would.

"How ridiculous of me," she answered. "I must look a strange sight this morning."

f.a.n.n.y became practical on the moment, since sympathy was evidently not desired. "Well, you'll start right away now," she stated, "and get out of your things. It's early yet, only about seven; I will brush your hair for you, and you will slip into bed. You needn't get up until late to-day, you know."

"I haven't the slightest desire to sleep," Joan told her; none the less she was obeying the other's commands. "And I have got to catch an early train."