That evening there was a vacant place at the Rectory dinner-table. Tristram Duplessis was to have filled it, but did not appear until dessert. He entered then with smiles and light-hearted apologies. “It isn’t often that I work, you’ll say, but when I do, I believe I’m not to be restrained. Thanks, Molesworth, anything will do for me.” This was how he put it, first to his hostess, next to the anxious butler, each of whom knew better. He chose to add, for the general benefit, “As a matter of fact, I got interested, and entirely forgot that a man must eat.”
“Or behave himself,” said the Rector, with lifted brows.
Duplessis paused, soup-spoon in air. “He should, no doubt. That’s why I’m so late. I had to dress, you see. Anon Soames must needs come in and talk his cricket. They play Cromberton to-morrow, and are two short. Will I be one, and bring another man? says Soames.” The spoon was emptied and put down. “I half promised to bring you, you know, Germain.” This was suavely addressed to Mr. John Germain, who unblinkingly received it.
“Where is your match?” Mr. Germain was peeling a peach, and did not look up. He was told, a home match, and then, without faltering before the “You play?” of as rude a young man as these islands can contain, replied deliberately, “I am very ready to oblige Mr. Soames.” The hush upon the dinner-table which followed this declaration was its most eloquent commentary. Mrs. James Germain surveyed the walls, as if calling them to witness her secret thoughts. The Rector drained his glass of sherry, and took another.
“My dear fellow, you make me feel an old fogey,” he said. “Do you know that I’ve not had a bat in my hand since I left Cambridge? And you’ll forgive me for remarking that you haven’t either, to the best of my belief.”
Mr. Germain, whose serenity was proof, reflected before he replied that that seemed an excellent reason for having one to-morrow. “Assuredly,” he said, “I shall rally to Mr. Soames, with whom I had a little chat this afternoon. He seemed an amiable and intelligent young man.”
“I like Soames,” the Rector agreed. “He’s a worker.”
Mrs. James said sharply, “He needs to be,” and received a bow. “My dear, it is now you who put me to shame.”
“Not in the least, James,” cried the lady. “You are as incapable of the feeling as I am of the action.”
The Rector twinkled. “Shameless? Really, my dear——”
“While Soames plays cricket, Cousin James writes sound theology,” said Duplessis, and got the lady off the rocks.
Mr. John Germain was now sedately sipping his port.
“That was a pleasant girl you had here,” he said, and got his sister-in-law’s attention. Duplessis did not look up from his plate, but he listened.
“You mean, I suppose——?”
“I mean Mrs. Bingham’s girl—the youngest of the three. I had a little chat with her, too—over our games. I was pleased with her friendly ways. They sit charmingly upon young ladies who are so apt to think that because their frocks are short their manners may be.”
Mrs. James spoke to her plate. “I think I understand, but am not altogether prepared to agree with you. Of course, at such gatherings one welcomes help; but I doubt whether it is wise to put ideas into heads which——”
“Which are not capable of holding ’em?” asked the Rector, using his eyebrows.
“Which can have little or no use for them, perhaps.”
Mr. Germain, having given this oracle due attention, pronounced upon it as if he were admonishing a poacher. “I am constrained to say that I did not observe a preponderance of ideas in Miss Cecily’s conversation.”
“Took the rails very neatly, I thought,” Duplessis put in, but Mrs. James was not to be balked.
“I don’t object to her taking rails or anything else of the sort. But I certainly think it a pity that she should take Mary Middleham’s arm, and walk among the children as if they were bosom friends.”
Mr. Germain squared his shoulders and lifted his head to reply. “Miss Middleham—” he said; but he was a slow beginner; Mrs. James had risen. It was her husband who fired the parting shot, that he would as soon take Mary Middleham’s arm as that of any one in the parish; and it was Duplessis, with his hand on the door, who received her answering shake of the head, and peered after her with quizzical eyes.
Conversation at her exit was between those two. John Germain never spoke to the young man if he could help it, and if he had occasion to look at him always blinked as he did so. Just now he had no occasion, being occupied with his thoughts, smiling quietly at them, drumming time to them with his thin fingers on the table.
We must inquire into Mr. Tristram’s avowed labours, and may not, perhaps, be surprised to find out of what nature they were. They had taken him, not to the study and the lamp, but into Lord Cantacute’s fine park by a wicket in the wall, to a largely spreading oak-tree and a seat upon the roots, to elbows on knees, a cigar, and some moments of frowning meditation, from which a light step upon the acorns caused him to look up, but not to rise. Miss Middleham, very flushed and bright-eyed, approached. She wore a cloak over her white dress. Watching her, his eyes narrowed, and as she came near hers lost much of their light.
“Good evening, Mr. Duplessis,” she said with careful formality.
He disregarded the greeting. “You’re late, my young friend.”
Then her grievance broke from her, and her eyes were eloquent with reproach. “My heart is in my mouth. I ought not to have come. You ought not to expect it.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I ask, but I never expect—and mostly I don’t want. What’s the matter?”
“Oh,” she sighed, “anything—everything. You never know who you may happen upon. And—if you’re going to be cross with me——”
“I’m not, my dear. I’m only cross with things that—well, with other sorts of things. Come and sit down. It’s all right now.”
She obeyed, but at some distance. She arranged her skirts over her ankles, and waited, not without the colour of expectancy, looking down at the toe of her shoe. Duplessis surveyed her at leisure.
“Well,” he said, and flicked the ash from his cigar, “I observed your junketings at the Rectory. My dear, you pleased.”
She looked prim. “Did I really?”
“You know that you did. How did you find old Germain?”
“He was very kind.”
“So I gathered. But how was he kind?”
“He was very kind.”
“My dear girl, I didn’t ask you how kind he was, but, How was he kind?”
“I beg your pardon. He praised me.”
“And you liked that?”
She made some show of spirit. “Of course I did. We all do—if we deserve it.”
“We’ll pass the quibble. Well—and did you deserve it?”
He got a reproachful look—and was rewarded.
“I did my best. I got very hot and was overtired. I’m awfully tired now.” If she expected pity from so naive an appeal, she got none.
“Well? Why come out, if you are tired?”
She flamed. “Because you asked me—because you said—I wish I had not come with all my heart.” She was on the edge of tears.
“I asked you because I thought that you would like to come. I have had some reason to think so. But we won’t talk about it if it distresses you. Have you read my book?”
She admitted that.
“Well?”
Her defences broken, she looked at him for the first time. “It was very kind of you to let me read it.”
But he couldn’t have her praises. “Oh, kind! Everybody’s kind—to you. What did you think about it?” That sent her eyelids down.
“I don’t suppose I understood half of it. I’m not clever, you know.”
He chuckled. “I’m not sure about that. Did you like ‘The Saint’s Walk’?”
“It was beautiful.”
“It was all about you, let me tell you. You in that red frock you had.”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, no.”
“But I am telling you that it was. It was an exercise perhaps—an exercise in the scenic. It may well be that there are no Saints—but either you can look the part, or I can see you in it.”
She may have had a sense that this kind of talk was intolerable, and her silence may have expressed it. Or she may have been ashamed to find out that it was not intolerable. At any rate, she made no attempt to break down the arm’s length at which he chose to hold her, while he continued to survey her, and to entertain himself.
“You cling to your saintship? Is that it?”
She raised her eyebrows, not her head. “You have just told me that I am not a saint. I think that you know very well.”
“If you were—I suppose you mean—you would not be talking to me under the Royal Oak?”
She laughed ruefully. “No, indeed. I ought not to be here!”
If she expected pity—was she to get it thus? Duplessis had no pity to bestow.
“It’s not the first time we have met here, is it?” Extraordinary, that to his screwing her nerves responded so faithfully.
“There should never have been a time,” she said, and meant it. It was part of his luxury to be sure that she felt in the wrong.
“Why not?” he probed her airily. “If two people want to talk to each other, what else are they to do? And there’s no doubt about our needs, I suppose?”
She had nothing to say to that—she was discretion itself; but the effect of her frugality was to bring him closer to where she sat.
“Do you care to keep my book?”—and before she could answer—“Well, then, keep it,” he said. “I’ll come up to-morrow and write your name in it, and mine too. Would you like that? Tell me, child.”
But as she hung her head and had no words, he had to tell himself. His arm went about her; he could feel her heart. He drew her to him, and her head lay on his breast. “That’s well,” he said, “that’s as it should always be. You are made to be captured.”
He had what he wanted of her after that, that sense of fluttering under the hand, of throbbing response to stroking phrases of which an epicure of the sort is never weary. With power grew the lust of power; if he could have made her see white black it would have gratified him. He told her that he must soon go to London, and made her lie the closer; he told her that he loved her, and made her sigh and cling. He told her that she was that which indeed she was not—a lover, his “little lover”—and felt the sweet flattery steal over her when she thrilled to it as the earth to a beam of the sun. Ravished by the thought of what he had to his hand, he pressed her, and bent over her where she crouched. “Mary,” he whispered as he stooped. “No, no,” she said, and put up her lips. That was the way of it, the saying and doing not without a pathetic simplicity, relished by him to the full.
Exquisite little triumph! which he was too wise to repeat. He spent another twenty minutes discoursing of himself, his works, and plans. Believing her to be interested—as he was himself—he became extremely kind, forgot to be jealous of John Germain’s notice, forgot to require or exact anything from her, forgot even to be rude. Really, he parted from her with more politeness than he would have shown to one of his own class—say, to Miss de Speyne. He sought no more favours. “I shall see you in the distance to-morrow, perhaps. I play cricket for Soames—I think he wants me. I don’t forget the book, you may be sure. Good night.”
It was nine o’clock before he reached his mother’s house, and by that time Miss Middleham’s person and his pleasure in it were absorbed into the vague physical comfort which a healthy young man feels in changing his clothes. They gave a zest to his bath and clean linen, quickened his brains, and strung him to activity of a sort. He sketched out an article for the weekly review which helped to support him, chaffed Soames, and comfortably dressed himself for the Rectory. There, as we know, he prevaricated, but there also he received some impressions which caused the image of Mary Middleham to visit him in the watches of the night.
He played with the thought of her, as she now appeared to him. A hint was enough; she was no saint, he had told her; and he knew that, for his purposes, she was all the better for that. Old Germain was clearly a victim—old Germain, of all men possible! How she attracted men—with her pallor, and heavy lids, and those peering, looming, speaking eyes beneath them. What did she want of them? Love, love, and more love—insatiable, was she—and unappeasable? A small, secret, pale, and careworn little huntress; hunting to be hunted, never caught and never catching. Strange! But there were women like that, nympholepts—and wherein lay their charm for men? Oh, well, he knew. He ought to know. And Germain—old Germain—great Heaven! A little Venus—Venus toute entière . . . and raised in a suburb, earning her bread as a nursery-governess! Stuff for a sonnet here! He laughed, and sketched it by the open window.
The thought was good. It pleased, excited him, kept him wakeful. A cigar into the still dark seemed reasonable.
She was charming. Her transparency was charming, which made it so easy to see her little shifts and designs; the casting of her home-made nets, and setting of her primitive snares. She betrayed her need so simply. When once you had her confidence there were no more drawbacks, no reticences. By George, she was as simply pagan as a South Sea Islander; not a stitch on her—and a scarlet flower between her teeth. One might drown one’s self in love—for a season—if one were a fool. But one was not, you see. This simple creature, this little Suburban Venus, showed such extraordinary aptitude for the rarer thing, was so susceptible to the finer shades of the business, that one would need be a tearing fool if he—No, and it would be a shame. He would never do that. Better on all accounts to be free—better not commit one’s self. She would always be there, could be counted upon. He knew women, he told himself.
They will wait for you—wait for ever, helped on by a little kindness. It’s not love they want from you—they have more than enough of that themselves; it’s tenderness, once the imagination is really struck. She! Oh, there was no doubt about her. She was his for all time, sensitive, flushing, and paling creature, alternately too bold and too coy. Bold when she ought not—coy when she need not; these were flaws, but he protested that they charmed him. Flaws there must be; it was not reasonable to suppose himself pioneer in that little thicket; and, while the knowledge must cheapen, yet it endeared her to him. Some subtle excitation of sense was stirred by that. What now?
He probed, but gave over the analysis. “Damn it, I’m too curious,” he said. “Sonnets don’t come this way. I must compose her, not dissect.”
But there was to be no more composition of sonnets. He had warped his mood, so threw away his cigar, and went to bed.