PROBABLY masculine obtuseness and the feminine faculty for dissimulation are together responsible for more than half the broken hearts with which the highways of life are littered.
The Recalcitrant Parent, the Other Woman—be she never so guileful—or the Other Man, as the case may be, are none of them as potent a menace to the ultimate happy issue of events as the mountain of small misunderstandings which a man and a maid in love are capable of piling up for themselves.
The man is prone to see only that which the woman intends he shall—and no self-respecting feminine thing is going to unveil the mysteries of her heart until she is very definitely assured that that is precisely what the man in the case is aching for her to do.
So she dissimulates with all the skill which Nature and a few odd thousand years or so of tradition have taught her and pretends that the Only Man in the World means rather less to her than her second-best shoe buckles. With the result that he probably goes silently and sadly away, convinced that he hasn’t an outside chance, while all the time she is simply quivering to pour out at his feet the whole treasure of her love.
In this respect Blaise and Jean blundered as egregiously as any other love-befogged pair.
Following upon their quarrel over the matter of Jean’s attitude towards Geoffrey Burke, Tormarin retreated once again into those fastnesses of aloof reserve which seemed to deny the whole memory of that “magic moment” at Montavan. And Jean, just because she was unhappy, flirted outrageously with the origin of the quarrel, finding a certain reckless enjoyment in the flavour of excitement lent to the proceedings by the fact that Burke was in deadly earnest.
Playing with an “unexploded bomb” at least sufficed to take her thoughts off other matters, and enabled her momentarily to forget everything for which forgetting seemed the only possible and sensible prescription.
But you can’t forget things by yourself. Solitude is memory’s closest friend. So Jean, heedless of consequences, encouraged Burke to help her.
Lady Anne sometimes sighed a little, as she watched the two go off together for a long morning on the river, or down to the tennis-court, accompanied, on occasion, by Claire Latimer and Nick to make up the set. But she held her peace. She was no believer in direct outside interference as a means towards the unravelment of a love tangle, and all that it was possible to do, indirectly, she had attempted when she revealed to Jean the history of Blaise’s marriage.
She did, however, make a proposal which would have the effect of breaking through the present trend of affairs and of throwing Blaise and Jean more or less continuously into each other’s company. She was worldly wise enough to give its due value to the power of propinquity, and her innocently proffered suggestion that she and her two sons and Jean should all run up to London for a week, before the season closed, was based on the knowledge of how much can be accomplished by the skilful handling of a partie carr茅e.
The suggestion was variously received. By Blaise, indifferently; by Jean, with her natural desire to know more of the great city she had glimpsed en route augmented by the knowledge that a constant round of sight-seeing and entertainment would be a further aid towards the process of forgetting; by Nick, the sun of whose existence rose and set at Charnwood, with open rebellion.
“Why go to be baked in London, madonna, when we might remain here in the comparative coolth of the country?” he murmured plaintively to his mother.
They were alone at the moment, and Lady Anne regarded him with twinkling eyes.
“Frankly, Nick, because I want Jean for my daughter-inlaw. No other reason in the world. Personally, as you know, I simply detest town during the season.”
He laughed and kissed her.
“What a Machiavelli in petticoats! I’d never have believed it of you, madonna. S’elp me, I wouldn’t!”
“Well, you may. And you’ve got to back me up, Nick. No philandering with Jean, mind! You’ll leave her severely alone and content yourself with the company of your aged parent.”
“Aged fiddlestick!” he jeered. “If it weren’t for that white hair of yours, I’d tote you round as my youngest sister. ‘And I don’t believe”—severely—“that it is white, really. I believe your maid powders it for you every morning, just because you were born in sin and know that it’s becoming.”
So it was settled that the first week of July should witness a general exodus from Staple, and meanwhile the June days slipped away, and Tormarin sedulously occupied himself in adding fresh stones to the wall which he thought fit to interpose between himself and the woman he loved. While Jean grew restless and afraid, and flung herself into every kind of amusement that offered, wearing a little fine under the combined mental and physical strain.
Claire, perceiving the nervous tension at which the girl was living, was wistfully troubled on her friend’s behalf, and confided her anxious bewilderment to Nick.
“I think Blaise must be crazy,” she declared one day. “I’m perfectly convinced that he’s in love with Jean, and yet he appears prepared to stand by while Geoffrey Burke completely monopolises her.”
Nick nodded.
“Yes. I own I can’t understand the fellow. He’ll wake up one day to find that she’s Burke’s wife.”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Claire hastily.
They were pacing up and down one of the gravelled alleys that intersected the famous rhododendron shrubbery at Charnwood, and, as she spoke, Claire cast a half-frightened glance in the direction of the house. She knew that Sir Adrian was closeted with his lawyer, and that he was, therefore, not in the least likely to emerge from the obscurity of his study for some time to come. But as long as he was anywhere on the place, she was totally unable to rid herself of the hateful consciousness of his presence.
He reminded her of some horrible and loathsome species of spider, at times remote and motionless in the centre of his web—that web in which, body and soul, she had been inextricably caught—but always liable to wake into sudden activity, and then pounce mercilessly.
“Oh, I hope not!” she repeated, shivering a little. “If she only knew what marriage to the wrong man means!... And I’m certain Geoffrey is the wrong man. Why on earth does Blaise behave like this?”—impatiently. “Anyone might think—Jean herself might think—he didn’t care! And I’m positive he does.”
“If he does, he’s a fool. Good Lord!”—moodily kicking a pebble out of his path—“imagine any sane man, with a clear road before him, not taking it!!” He swung round towards her suddenly. “Claire, if there were only a clear road—for us! If only I could take you away from all this!” his glance embracing the grey old house, so beautiful and yet so much a prison, which just showed above the tops of the tall-growing rhododendrons.
“Oh, hush! Hush!”
Claire glanced round her affrightedly, as though the very leaves and blossoms had ears to hear and tongues to repeat.
“One never knows”—she whispered the words barely above her breath—“where he is. He might easily be hidden in one of the alleys that run parallel with this.”
“The skunk!” muttered Nick wrathfully.
“What’s that?”
Claire drew suddenly closer to him, her face blanching. A sound—the light crunching of gravel beneath a footstep—had come to her strained ears.
“Nick! Did you hear?” she breathed.
A look of keen anxiety overspread his face. For himself, he did not care; Adrian Latimer could not hurt him. But Claire—his............