Double Harness Part 51

"A bruised reed thou shalt not break." Christine had the wisdom to remember that. Remorse must fall short of despair, self-knowledge of self-hatred, or there remains no possibility of a rebound to hope and effort. Christine came across to her friend with hands outstretched.

"No, no, dear," she said, "not you--not yourself! But this mood of yours, the way you're going on. And, true or false, isn't it what you must make Grantley think?"

Sibylla moved her hands in a restless gesture, protesting against the picture of herself--even thus softened--denying its truth, fascinated by it.

"I don't know," she murmured, "I don't know. Christine, it's a horrible idea!"

Christine fell on her knees beside her.

"If only you hadn't been so absurdly in love with him, my dear!" she whispered.

CHAPTER XXII

ASPIRATIONS AND COMMON SENSE

Rumour spoke truly. Young Walter Blake was back in town with an entirely new crop of aspirations maturing in the ready soil of his mind. The first crop had not proved fortunate. It had brought him into a position most disagreeable and humiliating to reflect upon, and into struggles for which he felt himself little fit. He had been given time to meditate and to cool--to cool even to shuddering when he recalled that night in the Sailors' Rest, and pictured the tragedy for which he had so nearly become responsible. His old desires waning, his aspirations were transfigured at the suggestion of a new attraction. He had been on the wrong tack--that was certain. Again virtue seemed to triumph in this admission. He no longer desired to be made good--it was (as he had conceived and attempted it) such a stormy and soul-shaking process. Now he desired to be kept good. He did not now want a guiding star which he was to follow through every peril, over threatening waves and through the trough of an angry sea. The night at the Sailors' Rest disposed of that metaphor and that ideal. Now he wanted an anchor by whose help he might ride out the storm, or a harbour whose placid bosom should support his gently swaying barque. Strength, constancy, and common sense supplanted imagination, ardour, and self-devotion as the requisites his life demanded.

Again Caylesham showed tact. He would not ask the lady's name. But when Blake next dined with him, he enjoyed the metamorphosis, and silently congratulated Grantley Imason.

"So it's St. George's, Hanover Square, and everything quite regular this time, is it?" he asked, with an indulgent humour. "Well, I fancy you're best suited to that. Only take care!"

"You may be sure that the woman I marry will be----" Blake began.

"Perfection? Oh, of course! That's universal. But it's not enough." He lay back comfortably in his armchair, enjoying his cigar. "Not enough, my boy! I may have two horses, and you may have two horses, and each of my horses may be better than either of your horses; but when we come to driving them, you may have the better pair. Two good 'uns don't always make a good pair." He grew quite interested in his subject--thanks, perhaps, to the figure in which he clothed it. "They've got to match--both their paces and their ways. They've got to go kindly together, to like the feel of one another, don't you know? Each of 'em may be as good as you like single, but they may make--by Jove, yes!--the devil of a bad pair! It's double harness we're talking about, Blake, my boy. Oh, you may think I know nothing about it, but I've seen a bit---- Well, that's not a thing I boast about; but I have seen a bit, you know."

"That's just what I've been thinking," said young Blake sagaciously. He referred to Caylesham's doctrines, not his experiences.

"Oh, you've been thinking, have you?" smiled Caylesham. "Come a mucker then, I suppose?"

"I--I miscalculated. Well, we must all learn by experience."

"Devilish lucky if we can!"

"There's no other way," Blake insisted.

"Have I said there is?" He looked at Blake in an amused knowledge.

"Going in for the straight thing this time?"

Half in pride, half in shame, Blake answered:

"Yes."

"Quite right too!" Caylesham was very approving.

"Well, if you say so----" began Blake, laughing.

"Quite right for you, I mean." There was a touch of contempt somewhere in his tone. "But don't forget what I've been saying. It's double harness, my boy! Pace, my boy, and temper, and the feel--the feel! All the things a fellow never thinks about!"

"Well, you're a pretty preacher on this subject!"

"I've heard a lot of things you never have. Oh, well, you may have once, perhaps." His glance was very acute, and Blake flushed under it. "You're well out of that affair," Caylesham went on, dropping his mask of ignorance. "Oh, I don't want to know how it happened. I expect I can guess."

"What do you mean?" Blake's voice sounded angry.

"You funked it--eh?"

It was a strong thing to say to a man in your own house. But a sudden gust of impatience had swept Caylesham away. The young man was in the end so contemptible, so incapable of strength, such a blarney over his weakness.

"Now don't glare at me; I'm not afraid. You tackled too big a job, I fancy. Oh, I'm not asking questions, you know." He got up and patted Blake's shoulder. "Don't mind me. You're doing quite right. Hope you won't find it devilish dull!"

Blake's bad temper vanished. He began to laugh.

"That's right," said Caylesham. "I'm too old to convert, and nearly too old to fight; but I'll be your best man, Walter."

"It'll keep me straight, Caylesham."

"Lord bless you, so it will!"

He chuckled in irrepressible amus.e.m.e.nt.

"The other thing's no go!"

"No more it is. It needs---- No, I'm not going to be immoral any more.

Go ahead! You're made for double harness, Walter. Choose her well!

you'll have to learn her paces, you know."

"Or she mine?"

Blake was a little on his dignity again.

"Have another whisky and soda," said Caylesham, with admirable tact.

His advice, meant as precautionary, proved provocative. Memory worked with it--the carking memory of a failure of courage. Blake might blarney as he would about awakened conscience, but Caylesham had put his finger on the sore spot. Pleasure's potentiality of tragedy had a.s.serted itself. It had been supremely disconcerting to discover and recognise its existence. Young Blake was for morality now--not so much because its eyes were turned upwards as for the blameless security of its embrace.

He had suffered such a scare. He really wondered how Caylesham had managed to stand the strain of pleasing himself--with the sudden tragic potentialities of it. He paid unwilling homage to the qualities necessary for vice--for candid unmasquerading vice; he knew all about the other species.

Yet he was not hard on Sibylla. He recognised her temperament, her unhappy circ.u.mstances, and his own personal attractions. What he did not recognise was the impression of himself which that night in the Sailors'

Rest would leave on her. He conceived an idea of his own magnanimity resting in her mind--yes, though such a notion could gain no comfortable footing in his.

Caylesham let him go without more advice--though he had half a mind to tell him not to marry a pretty woman.

"Oh, well, in his present mood he won't; and it would do him lots of good if he did," the impenitent, clear-sighted, good-humoured sinner reflected, with all the meaning which his experience could put into the words. He was of opinion that for certain people the only chance of salvation lay in suffering gross injustice. "If what a fellow brings on himself is injustice," he used to say. He always maintained that fellows brought it on themselves--an expiring gasp of conscience, perhaps.

Gossip and conjecture had played so much with Walter Blake's name that Mrs. Selford had at first been shy of his approaches and chary of her welcome. "We must think of Anna," she had said to her husband. But thinking of or for Anna was rapidly becoming superfluous. The young woman took that department to herself. Her stylishness grew marvellously, and imposed a yoke of admiring submission. It was an extraordinary change from the awkward, dowdy, suppressed girl to this excellently appointed product. The liberty so tardily conceded was making up for lost time, and bade fair to transform itself into a tyranny. The parents were ready subjects, and cast back from the theories of to-day a delusive light on the practices of the past. They concluded that they had always indulged Anna, and that the result was most satisfactory. Then they must indulge her still. So Blake's visits went on, and the welcome became cordial. For Anna was quite clear that she at least had nothing against Blake. His attraction for her was not what had been his charm in Sibylla's eyes. Her impulse was not to reform; it was to conquer. But gossip and conjectures as to his past life were as good incentives to the one task as to the other. His good looks, his air of fas.h.i.+on, his comfortable means, helped the work. He widened the horizon of men for her, and made her out of conceit with her first achievements. She was content that Jeremy should disappear from her court; she became contemptuously impatient of Alec Turner's suit.

She was fastidious and worldly-wise.