'I was a King in BabylonAnd you were a Christian slave'
'I was a King in BabylonAnd you were a Christian slave'
—I mean a candidate."
Marjorie remembered suddenly. "You're Professor Trafford."
"Not in this atmosphere. But I am at the Romeike College. And as soon as I recalled examining you I remembered it—minutely. You were intelligent, though unsound—about cryo-hydrates it was. Ah, you remember me now. As most young women are correct by rote and unintelligent in such questions, and as it doesn't matter a rap about anything of that sort, whether you are correct or not, as long as the mental gesture is right——" He paused for a moment, as though tired of his sentence. "I remembered you."
He proceeded in his easy and detached manner, that seemed to make every topic possible, to tell her his first impressions of her, and show how very distinctly indeed he remembered her.
"You set me philosophizing. I'd never examined a girls' school before, and I was suddenly struck by the spectacle of the fifty of you. What's going to become of them all?"
"I thought," he went on, "how bright you were, and how keen and eager you were—you, I mean, in particular—and just how certain it was your brightnessand eagerness would be swallowed up by some silly ordinariness or other—stuffy marriage or stuffy domestic duties. The old, old story—done over again with a sort of threadbare badness. (Nothing to say against it if it's done well.) I got quite sentimental and pathetic about life's breach of faith with women. Odd, isn't it, how one's mind runs on. But that's what I thought. It's all come back to me."
Marjorie's bright, clear eye came round to him. "I don't see very much wrong with the lot of women," she reflected. "Things are different nowadays. Anyhow——"
She paused.
"You don't want to be a man?"
"No!"
She was emphatic.
"Some of us cut more sharply at life than you think," he said, plumbing her unspoken sense.
She had never met a man before who understood just how a girl can feel the slow obtuseness of his sex. It was almost as if he had found her out at something.
"Oh," she said, "perhaps you do," and looked at him with an increased interest.
"I'm half-feminine, I believe," he said. "For instance, I've got just a woman's joy in textures and little significant shapes. I know how you feel about that. I can spend hours, even now, in crystal gazing—I don't mean to see some silly revelation of some silly person's proceedings somewhere, but just for the things themselves. I wonder if you have ever been in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and looked at Ruskin's crystal collection? I saw it when I was a boy, and it became—I can't help the word—an obsession. The inclusions like moss and like trees, and all sorts of fantastic things, and the cleavages and enclosures with little bubbles, and thelights and shimmer—What were we talking about? Oh, about the keen way your feminine perceptions cut into things. And yet somehow I was throwing contempt on the feminine intelligence. I don't do justice to the order of my thoughts. Never mind. We've lost the thread. But I wish you knew my mother."
He went on while Marjorie was still considering the proper response to this.
"You see, I'm her only son and she brought me up, and we know each other—oh! very well. She helps with my work. She understands nearly all of it. She makes suggestions. And to this day I don't know if she's the most original or the most parasitic of creatures. And that's the way with all women and girls, it seems to me. You're as critical as light, and as undiscriminating.... I say, do I strike you as talking nonsense?"
"Not a bit," said Marjorie. "But you do go rather fast."
"I know," he admitted. "But somehow you excite me. I've been with Solomonson a week, and he's dull at all times. It was that made me take out that monoplane of his. But it did him no good."
He paused.
"They told me after the exam.," said Marjorie, "you knew more about crystallography—than anyone."
"Does that strike you as a dull subject?"
"No," said Marjorie, in a tone that invited justifications.
"It isn't. I think—naturally, that the world one goes into when one studies molecular physics is quite the most beautiful of Wonderlands.... I can assure you I work sometimes like a man who is exploring a magic palace.... Do you know anythingof molecular physics?"
"You examined me," said Marjorie.
"The sense one has of exquisite and wonderful rhythms—just beyond sound and sight! And there's a taunting suggestion of its being all there, displayed and confessed, if only one were quick enough to see it. Why, for instance, when you change the composition of a felspar almost imperceptibly, do the angles change? What's the correspondence between the altered angle and the substituted atom? Why does this bit of clear stuff swing the ray of light so much out of its path, and that swing it more? Then what happens when crystals gutter down, and go into solution. The endless launching of innumerable little craft. Think what a clear solution must be if only one had ultra-microscopic eyes and could see into it, see the extraordinary patternings, the swimming circling constellations. And then the path of a ray of polarized light beating through it! It takes me like music. Do you know anything of the effects of polarized light, the sight of a slice of olivine-gabbro for instance between crossed Nicols?"
"I've seen some rock sections," said Marjorie. "I forget the names of the rocks."
"The colours?"
"Oh yes, the colours."
"Is there anything else so rich and beautiful in all the world? And every different mineral and every variety of that mineral has a different palette of colours, a different scheme of harmonies—and is telling you something."
"If only you understood."
"Exactly. All the ordinary stuff of life—you know—the carts and motor cars and dusty roads and—cinder sifting, seems so blank to me—with that persuasion of swing and subtlety beneath it all. Asif the whole world was fire and crystal and aquiver—with some sort of cotton wrappers thrown over it...."
"Dust sheets," said Marjorie. "I know."
"Or like a diamond painted over!"
"With that sort of grey paint, very full of body—that lasts."
"Yes." He smiled at her. "I can't help apologetics. Most people think a professor of science is just——"
"A professor of science."
"Yes. Something all pedantries and phrases. I want to clear my character. As though it is foolish to follow a vortex ring into a vacuum, and wise to whack at a dirty golf ball on a suburban railway bank. Oh, their golf! Under high heaven!... You don't play golf, do you, by any chance?"
"Only the woman's part," said Marjorie.
"And they despise us," he said. "Solomonson can hardly hide how he despises us. Nothing is more wonderful than the way these people go on despising us who do research, who have this fever of curiosity, who won't be content with—what did you call those wrappers?"
"Dust sheets."
"Yes, dust sheets. What a life! Swaddling bands, dust sheets and a shroud! You know, research and discovery aren't nearly so difficult as people think—if only you have the courage to say a thing or try a thing now and then that it isn't usual to say or try. And after all——" he went off at a tangent, "these confounded ordinary people aren't justified in their contempt. We keep on throwing them things over our shoulders, electric bells, telephones, Marconigrams. Look at the beautiful electric trains that come towering down theLondon streets at nightfall, ships of light in full sail! Twenty years ago they were as impossible as immortality. We conquer the seas for these—golfers, puts arms in their hands that will certainly blow them all to bits if ever the idiots go to war with them, come sailing out of the air on them——"
He caught Marjorie's eye and stopped.
"Fallingout of the air on them," corrected Marjorie very softly.
"That was only an accident," said Mr. Trafford....
So they began a conversation in the lane where the trees met overhead that went on and went on like a devious path in a shady wood, and touched upon all manner of things....
§ 7
In the end quite a number of people were aggrieved by this dialogue, in the lane that led nowhither....
Sir Rupert Solomonson was the first to complain. Trafford had been away "three mortal hours." No one had come near him, not a soul, and there hadn't been even a passing car to cheer his ear.
Sir Rupert admitted he had to be quiet. "But not sodamnedquiet."
"I'd have been glad," said Sir Rupert, "if a hen had laid an egg and clucked a bit. You might have thought there had been a Resurrection or somethin', and cleared off everybody. Lord! it was deadly. I'd have sung out myself if it hadn't been for these infernal ribs...."
Mrs. Pope came upon the affair quite by accident.
"Well, Marjorie," she said as she poured tea for the family, "did you get your laces?"
"Never got there, Mummy," said Marjorie, andpaused fatally.
"Didn't get there!" said Mrs. Pope. "That's worse than Theodore! Wouldn't the donkey go, poor dear?"
There was nothing to colour about, and yet Marjorie felt the warm flow in neck and cheek and brow. She threw extraordinary quantities of candour into her manner. "I had a romantic adventure," she said rather quietly. "I was going to tell you."
(Sensation.)
"You see it was like this," said Marjorie. "I ran against Mr. Trafford...."
She drank tea, and pulled herself together for a lively description of the wheel-locking and the subsequent conversation, a bright ridiculous account which made the affair happen by implication on the high road and not in a byeway, and was adorned with every facetious ornament that seemed likely to get a laugh from the children. But she talked rather fast, and she felt she forced the fun a little. However, it amused the children all right, and Theodore created a diversion by choking with his tea. From first to last Marjorie was extremely careful to avoid the affectionate scrutiny of her mother's eye. And had this lasted thewholeafternoon? asked Mrs. Pope. "Oh, they'd talked for half-an-hour," said Marjorie, or more, and had driven back very slowly together. "He did all the talking. You saw what he was yesterday. And the donkeys seemed too happy together to tear them away."
"But what was it all about?" asked Daffy curious.
"He asked after you, Daffy, most affectionately," said Marjorie, and added, "several times." (Though Trafford had as a matter of fact displayed a quite remarkable disregard of all her family.)
"And," she went on, getting a plausible idea atlast, "he explained all about aeroplanes. And all that sort of thing. Has Daddy gone to Wamping for some more cricket?..."
(But none of this was lost on Mrs. Pope.)
§ 8
Mr. Magnet's return next day was heralded by nearly two-thirds of a column in theTimes.
The Lecture on the Characteristics of Humour had evidently been quite a serious affair, and a very imposing list of humorists and of prominent people associated with their industry had accepted the hospitality of theLiterati.
Marjorie ran her eyes over the Chairman's flattering introduction, then with a queer faint flavour of hostility she reached her destined husband's utterance. She seemed to hear the flat full tones of his voice as she read, and automatically the desiccated sentences of the reporter filled out again into those rich quietly deliberate unfoldings of sound that were already too familiar to her ear.
Mr. Magnet had begun with modest disavowals. "There was a story, he said,"—so the report began—"whose hallowed antiquity ought to protect it from further exploitation, but he was tempted to repeat it because it offered certain analogies to the present situation. There were three characters in the story, a bluebottle and two Scotsmen. (Laughter.) The bluebottle buzzed on the pane, otherwise a profound silence reigned. This was broken by one of the Scotsmen trying to locate the bluebottle with zoölogical exactitude. Said this Scotsman: 'Sandy, I am thinking if yon fly is a birdie or a beastie.' The other replied: 'Man, don't spoil good whiskey with religious conversation.' (Laughter.) He was tempted, Mr. Magnet resumed, to ask himself andthem why it was that they should spoil the aftereffects of a most excellent and admirably served dinner by an academic discussion on British humour. At first he was pained by the thought that they proposed to temper their hospitality with a demand for a speech. A closer inspection showed that he was to introduce a debate and that others were to speak, and that was a new element in their hospitality. Further, he was permitted to choose the subject so that he could bring their speeches within the range of his comprehension. (Laughter.) His was an easy task. He could make it easier; the best thing to do would be to say nothing at all. (Laughter.)"
For a space the reporter seemed to have omitted largely—perhaps he was changing places with his relief—and the next sentence showed Mr. Magnet engaged as it were in revising ahortus siccusof jokes. "There was the humour of facts and situations," he was saying, "or that humour of expression for which there was no human responsibility, as in the case of Irish humour; he spoke of the humour of the soil which found its noblest utterance in the bull. Humour depended largely on contrast. There was a humour of form and expression which had many local varieties. American humour had been characterized by exaggeration, the suppression of some link in the chain of argument or narrative, and a wealth of simile and metaphor which had been justly defined as the poetry of a pioneer race."...
Marjorie's attention slipped its anchor, and caught lower down upon: "In England there was a near kinship between laughter and tears; their mental relations were as close as their physical. Abroad this did not appear to be the case. It was different in France. But perhaps on the whole it would bebetter to leave the humour of France and what some people still unhappily chose to regard as matters open to controversy—he referred to choice of subject—out of their discussion altogether. ('Hear, hear,' and cheers.)"...
Attention wandered again. Then she remarked:—it reminded her in some mysterious way of a dropped hairpin—"It was noticeable that the pun to a great extent had become démodé...."
At this point the flight of Marjorie's eyes down the column was arrested by her father's hand gently but firmly taking possession of theTimes. She yielded it without reluctance, turned to the breakfast table, and never resumed her study of the social relaxations of humorists....
Indeed she forgot it. Her mind was in a state of extreme perplexity. She didn't know what to make of herself or anything or anybody. Her mind was full of Trafford and all that he had said and done and all that he might have said and done, and it was entirely characteristic that she could not think of Magnet in any way at all except as a bar-like shadow that lay across all her memories and all the bright possibilities of this engaging person.
She thought particularly of the mobile animation of his face, the keen flash of enthusiasm in his thoughts and expressions....
It was perhaps more characteristic of her time than of her that she did not think she was dealing so much with a moral problem as an embarrassment, and that she hadn't as yet felt the first stirrings of self-reproach for the series of disingenuous proceedings that had rendered the yesterday's encounter possible. But she was restless, wildly restless as a bird whose nest is taken. She could abide nowhere. She fretted through the morning, avoided Daffy in amarked manner, and inflicted a stinging and only partially merited rebuke upon Theodore for slouching, humping and—of all trite grievances!—not washing behind his ears. As if any chap washed behind his ears! She thought tennis with the pseudo-twins might assuage her, but she broke off after losing two sets; and then she went into the garden to get fresh flowers, and picked a large bunch and left them on the piano until her mother reminded her of them. She tried a little Shaw. She struggled with an insane wish to walk through the wood behind the village and have an accidental meeting with someone who couldn't possibly appear but whom it would be quite adorable to meet. Anyhow she conquered that.
She had a curious and rather morbid indisposition to go after lunch to the station and meet Mr. Magnet as her mother wished her to do, in order to bring him straight to the vicarage to early tea, but here again reason prevailed and she went.
Mr. Magnet arrived by the 2.27, and to Marjorie's eye his alighting presence had an effect of being not so much covered with laurels as distended by them. His face seemed whiter and larger than ever. He waved a great handful of newspapers.
"Hullo, Magsy!" he said. "They've given me a thumping Press. I'm nearer swelled head than I've ever been, so mind how you touch me!"
"We'll take it down at croquet," said Marjorie.
"They've cleared that thing away?"
"And made up the lawn like a billiard table," she said.
"That makes for skill," he said waggishly. "I shall save my head after all."
For a moment he seemed to loom towards kissing her, but she averted this danger by a business-likeconcern for his bag. He entrusted this to a porter, and reverted to the triumph of overnight so soon as they were clear of the station. He was overflowing with kindliness towards his fellow humorists, who had appeared in force and very generously at the banquet, and had said the most charming things—some of which were in one report and some in another, and some the reporters had missed altogether—some of the kindliest.
"It's a pleasant feeling to think that a lot of good fellows think you are a good fellow," said Mr. Magnet.
He became solicitous for her. How had she got on while he was away? She asked him how one was likely to get on at Buryhamstreet; monoplanes didn't fall every day, and as she said that it occurred to her she was behaving meanly. But he was going on to his next topic before she could qualify.
"I've got something in my pocket," he remarked, and playfully: "Guess."
She did, but she wouldn't. She had a curious sinking of the heart.
"I want you to see it before anyone else," he said. "Then if you don't like it, it can go back. It's a sapphire."
He was feeling nervously in his pockets and then the little box was in her hand.
She hesitated to open it. It made everything so dreadfully concrete. And this time the sense of meanness was altogether acuter. He'd bought this in London; he'd brought it down, hoping for her approval. Yes, it was—horrid. But what was she to do?
"It's—awfully pretty," she said with the glittering symbol in her hand, and indeed he had gone to one of those artistic women who are reviving andimproving upon the rich old Roman designs. "It's so beautifully made."
"I'm so glad you like it. You reallydolike it?"
"I don't deserve it."
"Oh! But youdolike it?"
"Enormously."
"Ah! I spent an hour in choosing it."
She could see him. She felt as though she had picked his pocket.
"Only I don't deserve it, Mr. Magnet. Indeed I don't. I feel I am taking it on false pretences."
"Nonsense, Magsy. Nonsense! Slip it on your finger, girl."
"But I don't," she insisted.
He took the box from her, pocketed it and seized her hand. She drew it away from him.
"No!" she said. "I feel like a cheat. You know, I don't—I'm sure I don't love——"
"I'll love enough for two," he said, and got her hand again. "No!" he said at her gesture, "you'll wear it. Why shouldn't you?"
And so Marjorie came back along the vicarage avenue with his ring upon her hand. And Mr. Pope was evidently very glad to see him....
The family was still seated at tea upon rugs and wraps, and still discussing humorists at play, when Professor Trafford appeared, leaning on a large stick and limping, but resolute, by the church gate. "Pish!" said Mr. Pope. Marjorie tried not to reveal a certain dismay, there was dumb, rich approval in Daphne's eyes, and the pleasure of Theodore and the pseudo-twins was only too scandalously evident. "Hoo-Ray!" said Theodore, with ill-concealed relief.
Mrs. Pope was the incarnate invocation of tactas Trafford drew near.
"I hope," he said, with obvious insincerity, "I don't invade you. But Solomonson is frightfully concerned and anxious about your lawn, and whether his men cleared it up properly and put things right." His eye went about the party and rested on Marjorie. "How are you?" he said, in a friendly voice.
"Well, we seem to have got our croquet lawn back," said Mr. Pope. "And our nerves are recovering. How is Sir Rupert?"
"A little fractious," said Trafford, with the ghost of a smile.
"You'll take some tea?" said Mrs. Pope in the pause that followed.
"Thank you," said Trafford and sat down instantly.
"I saw your jolly address in theStandard," he said to Magnet. "I haven't read anything so amusing for some time."
"Rom dear," said Mrs. Pope, "will you take the pot in and get some fresh tea?"
Mr. Trafford addressed himself to the flattery of Magnet with considerable skill. He had detected a lurking hostility in the eyes of the two gentlemen that counselled him to propitiate them if he meant to maintain his footing in the vicarage, and now he talked to them almost exclusively and ignored the ladies modestly but politely in the way that seems natural and proper in a British middle-class house of the better sort. But as he talked chiefly of the improvement of motor machinery that had recently been shown at the Engineering Exhibition, he did not make that headway with Marjorie's father that he had perhaps anticipated. Mr. Pope fumed quietly for a time, and then suddenly spoke out.
"I'm no lover of machines," he said abruptly,slashing across Mr. Trafford's description. "All our troubles began with villainous saltpetre. I'm an old-fashioned man with a nose—and a neck, and I don't want the one offended or the other broken. No, don't ask me to be interested in your valves and cylinders. What do you say, Magnet? It starts machinery in my head to hear about them...."
On such occasions as this when Mr. Pope spoke out, his horror of an anti-climax or any sort of contradiction was apt to bring the utterance to a culmination not always to be distinguished from a flight. And now he rose to his feet as he delivered himself.
"Who's for a game of tennis?" he said, "in this last uncontaminated patch of air? I and Marjorie will give you a match, Daffy—if Magnet isn't too tired to join you."
Daffy looked at Marjorie for an instant.
"We'll want you, Theodore, to look after the balls in the potatoes," said Mr. Pope lest that ingenuous mind should be corrupted behind his back....
Mrs. Pope found herself left to entertain a slightly disgruntled Trafford. Rom and Syd hovered on the off chance of notice, at the corner of the croquet lawn nearest the tea things. Mrs. Pope had already determined to make certain little matters clearer than they appeared to be to this agreeable but superfluous person, and she was greatly assisted by his opening upon the subject of her daughters. "Jolly tennis looks," he said.
"Don't they?" said Mrs. Pope. "I think it is such a graceful game for a girl."
Mr. Trafford glanced at Mrs. Pope's face, but her expression was impenetrable.
"They both like it and play it so well," she said. "Their father is so skillful and interested ingames. Marjorie tells me you were her examiner a year or so ago."
"Yes. She struck my memory—her work stood out."
"Of course she is clever," said Mrs. Pope. "Or we shouldn't have sent her to Oxbridge. There she's doing quite well—quite well. Everyone says so. I don't know, of course, if Mr. Magnet will let her finish there."
"Mr. Magnet?"
"She's just engaged to him. Of course she's frightfully excited about it, and naturally he wants her to come away and marry. There's very little excuse for a long engagement. No."
Her voice died in a musical little note, and she seemed to be scrutinizing the tennis with an absorbed interest. "They've got new balls," she said, as if to herself.
Trafford had rolled over, and she fancied she detected a change in his voice when it came. "Isn't it rather a waste not to finish a university career?" he said.
"Oh, it wouldn't be wasted. Of course a girl like that will be hand and glove with her husband. She'll be able to help him with the scientific side of his jokes and all that. I sometimes wish it had been Daffy who had gone to college though. I sometimes think we've sacrificed Daffy a little. She's not the bright quickness of Marjorie, but there's something quietly solid about her mind—somethingstable. Perhaps I didn't want her to go away from me.... Mr. Magnet is doing wonders at the net. He's just begun to play—to please Marjorie. Don't you think he's a dreadfully amusing man, Mr. Trafford? He says suchquietthings."
§ 9
The effect of thiséclaircissementupon Mr. Traffordwas not what it should have been. Properly he ought to have realized at once that Marjorie was for ever beyond his aspirations, and if he found it too difficult to regard her with equanimity, then he ought to have shunned her presence. But instead, after his first shock of incredulous astonishment, his spirit rose in a rebellion against arranged facts that was as un-English as it was ungentlemanly. He went back to Solomonson with a mood of thoughtful depression giving place to a growing passion of indignation. He presented it to himself in a generalized and altruistic form. "What the deuce is the good of all this talk of Eugenics," he asked himself aloud, "if they are going to hand over that shining girl to that beastly little area sneak?"
He called Mr. Magnet a "beastly little area sneak!"
Nothing could show more clearly just how much he had contrived to fall in love with Marjorie during his brief sojourn in Buryhamstreet and the acuteness of his disappointment, and nothing could be more eloquent of his forcible and undisciplined temperament. And out of ten thousand possible abusive epithets with which his mind was no doubt stored, this one, I think, had come into his head because of the alert watchfulness with which Mr. Magnet followed a conversation, as he waited his chance for some neat but brilliant flash of comment....
Trafford, like Marjorie, was another of those undisciplined young people our age has produced in such significant quantity. He was just six-and-twenty, but the facts that he was big of build, had as an only child associated much with grown-up people, and was already a conspicuous success in theworld of micro-chemical research, had given him the self-reliance and assurance of a much older man. He had still to come his croppers and learn most of the important lessons in life, and, so far, he wasn't aware of it. He was naturally clean-minded, very busy and interested in his work, and on remarkably friendly and confidential terms with his mother who kept house for him, and though he had had several small love disturbances, this was the first occasion that anything of the kind had ploughed deep into his feelings and desires.
Trafford's father had died early in life. He had been a brilliant pathologist, one of that splendid group of scientific investigators in the middle Victorian period which shines ever more brightly as our criticism dims their associated splendours, and he had died before he was thirty through a momentary slip of the scalpel. His wife—she had been his wife for five years—found his child and his memory and the quality of the life he had made about her too satisfying for the risks of a second marriage, and she had brought up her son with a passionate belief in the high mission of research and the supreme duty of seeking out and expressing truth finely. And here he was, calling Mr. Magnet a "beastly little area sneak."
The situation perplexed him. Marjorie perplexed him. It was, had he known it, the beginning for him of a lifetime of problems and perplexities. He was absolutely certain she didn't love Magnet. Why, then, had she agreed to marry him? Such pressures and temptations as he could see about her seemed light to him in comparison with such an undertaking.
Were they greater than he supposed?
His method of coming to the issue of that problemwas entirely original. He presented himself next afternoon with the air of an invited guest, drove Mr. Pope who was suffering from liver, to expostulatory sulking in the study, and expressed a passionate craving for golf-croquet, in spite of Mrs. Pope's extreme solicitude for his still bandaged ankle. He was partnered with Daffy, and for a long time he sought speech with Marjorie in vain. At last he was isolated in a corner of the lawn, and with the thinnest pretence of inadvertence, in spite of Daffy's despairing cry of "She plays next!" he laid up within two yards of her. He walked across to her as she addressed herself to her ball, and speaking in an incredulous tone and with the air of a comment on the game, he said: "I say, are you engaged to that chap Magnet?"
Marjorie was amazed, but remarkably not offended. Something in his tone set her trembling. She forgot to play, and stood with her mallet hanging in her hand.
"Punish him!" came the voice of Magnet from afar.
"Yes," she said faintly.
His remark came low and clear. It had a note of angry protest. "Why?"
Marjorie, by the way of answer, hit her ball so that it jumped and missed his, ricochetted across the lawn and out of the ground on the further side.
"I'm sorry if I've annoyed you," said Trafford, as Marjorie went after her ball, and Daffy thanked heaven aloud for the respite.
They came together no more for a time, and Trafford, observant with every sense, found no clue to the riddle of her grave, intent bearing. She played very badly, and with unusual care and deliberation. He felt he had made a mess of things altogether,and suddenly found his leg was too painful to go on. "Partner," he asked, "will you play out my ball for me? I can't go on. I shall have to go."
Marjorie surveyed him, while Daffy and Magnet expressed solicitude. He turned to go, mallet in hand, and found Marjorie following him.
"Is that the heavier mallet?" she asked, and stood before him looking into his eyes and weighing a mallet in either hand.
"Mr. Trafford, you're one of the worst examiners I've ever met," she said.
He looked puzzled.
"I don't knowwhy," said Marjorie, "I wonder as much as you. But I am"; and seeing the light dawning in his eyes, she turned about, and went back to the debacle of her game.
§ 10
After that Mr. Trafford had one clear desire in his being which ruled all his other desires. He wanted a long, frank, unembarrassed and uninterrupted conversation with Marjorie. He had a very strong impression that Marjorie wanted exactly the same thing. For a week he besieged the situation in vain. After the fourth day Solomonson was only kept in Buryhamstreet by sheer will-power, exerted with a brutality that threatened to end that friendship abruptly. He went home on the sixth day in his largest car, but Trafford stayed on beyond the limits of decency to perform some incomprehensible service that he spoke of as "clearing up."
"I want," he said, "to clear up."
"But whatisthere to clear up, my dear boy?"
"Solomonson, you're a pampered plutocrat," said Trafford, as though everything was explained.
"I don't see any sense in it at all," said Solomonson,and regarded his friend aslant with thick, black eyebrows raised.
"I'm going to stay," said Trafford.
And Solomonson said one of those unhappy and entirely disregarded things that ought never to be said.
"There's some girl in this," said Solomonson.
"Your bedroom's always waiting for you at Riplings," he said, when at last he was going off....
Trafford's conviction that Marjorie also wanted, with an almost equal eagerness, the same opportunity for speech and explanations that he desired, sustained him in a series of unjustifiable intrusions upon the seclusion of the Popes. But although the manner of Mr. and Mrs. Pope did change considerably for the better after his next visit, it was extraordinary how impossible it seemed for him and Marjorie to achieve their common end of an encounter.
Always something intervened.
In the first place, Mrs. Pope's disposition to optimism had got the better of her earlier discretions, and a casual glance at Daphne's face when their visitor reappeared started quite a new thread of interpretations in her mind. She had taken the opportunity of hinting at this when Mr. Pope asked over his shirt-stud that night, "What the devil that—that chauffeur chap meant by always calling in the afternoon."
"Now that Will Magnet monopolizes Marjorie," she said, after a little pause and a rustle or so, "I don't see why Daffy shouldn't have a little company of her own age."
Mr. Pope turned round and stared at her. "I didn't think of that," he said. "But, anyhow, I don't like the fellow."
"He seems to be rather clever," said Mrs. Pope,"though he certainly talks too much. And after all it was Sir Rupert's aeroplane.Hewas only driving it to oblige."
"He'll think twice before he drives another," said Mr. Pope, wrenching off his collar....
Once Mrs. Pope had turned her imagination in this more and more agreeable direction, she was rather disposed, I am afraid, to let it bolt with her. And it was a deflection that certainly fell in very harmoniously with certain secret speculations of Daphne's. Trafford, too, being quite unused to any sort of social furtiveness, did perhaps, in order to divert attention from his preoccupation with Marjorie, attend more markedly to Daphne than he would otherwise have done. And so presently he found Daphne almost continuously on his hands. So far as she was concerned, he might have told her the entire history of his life, and every secret he had in the world, without let or hindrance. Mrs. Pope, too, showed a growing appreciation of his company, became sympathetic and confidential in a way that invited confidence, and threw a lot of light on her family history and Daffy's character. She had found Daffy a wonderful study, she said. Mr. Pope, too, seemed partly reconciled to him. The idea that, after all, both motor cars and monoplane were Sir Rupert's, and not Trafford's, had produced a reaction in the latter gentleman's favour. Moreover, it had occurred to him that Trafford's accident had perhaps disposed him towards a more thoughtful view of mechanical traction, and that this tendency would be greatly helped by a little genial chaff. So that he ceased to go indoors when Trafford was there, and hung about, meditating and delivering sly digs at this new victim of his ripe, old-fashioned humour.
Nor did it help Trafford in his quest for Marjorieand a free, outspoken delivery that the pseudo-twins considered him a person of very considerable charm, and that Theodore, though indisposed to "suck up" to him publicly—I write here in Theodorese—did so desire intimate and solitary communion with him, more particularly in view of the chances of an adventitious aeroplane ride that seemed to hang about him—as to stalk him persistently—hovering on the verge of groups, playing a waiting game with a tennis ball and an old racquet, strolling artlessly towards the gate of the avenue when the time seemed ripening for his appearance or departure.
On the other hand, Marjorie was greatly entangled by Magnet.
Magnet was naturally an attentive lover; he was full of small encumbering services, and it made him none the less assiduous to perceive that Marjorie seemed to find no sort of pleasure in all the little things he did. He seemed to think that if picking the very best rose he could find for her did not cause a very perceptible brightening in her, then it was all the more necessary quietly to force her racquet from her hand and carry it for her, or help her ineffectually to cross a foot-wide ditch, or offer to read her in a rich, abundant, well modulated voice, some choice passage from "The Forest Lovers" of Mr. Maurice Hewlett. And behind these devotions there was a streak of jealousy. He knew as if by instinct that it was not wise to leave these two handsome young people together; he had a queer little disagreeable sensation whenever they spoke to one another or looked at one another. Whenever Trafford and Marjorie found themselves in a group, there was Magnet in the midst of them. He knew the value of his Marjorie, and did not mean to loseher....
Being jointly baffled in this way was oddly stimulating to Marjorie's and Trafford's mutual predisposition. If you really want to throw people together, the thing to do—thank God for Ireland!—is to keep them apart. By the fourth day of this emotional incubation, Marjorie was thinking of Trafford to the exclusion of all her reading; and Trafford was lying awake at nights—oh, for half an hour and more—thinking of bold, decisive ways of getting at Marjorie, and bold, decisive things to say to her when he did.
(But why she should be engaged to Magnet continued, nevertheless, to puzzle him extremely. It was a puzzle to which no complete solution was ever to be forthcoming....)
§ 11
At last that opportunity came. Marjorie had come with her mother into the village, and while Mrs. Pope made some purchases at the general shop she walked on to speak to Mrs. Blythe the washerwoman. Trafford suddenly emerged from the Red Lion with a soda syphon under each arm. She came forward smiling.
"I say," he said forthwith, "I want to talk with you—badly."
"And I," she said unhesitatingly, "with you."
"How can we?"
"There's always people about. It's absurd."
"We'll have to meet."
"Yes."
"I have to go away to-morrow. I ought to have gone two days ago. Wherecanwe meet?"
She had it all prepared.
"Listen," she said. "There is a path runs from our shrubbery through a little wood to a stile on the main road." He nodded. "Either I will be there at three or about half-past five or—there's one more chance. While father and Mr. Magnet are smoking at nine.... I might get away."
"Couldn't I write?"
"No. Impossible."
"I've no end of things to say...."
Mrs. Pope appeared outside her shop, and Trafford gesticulated a greeting with the syphons. "All right," he said to Marjorie. "I'm shopping," he cried as Mrs. Pope approached.
§ 12
All through the day Marjorie desired to go to Trafford and could not do so. It was some minutes past nine when at last with a swift rustle of skirts that sounded louder than all the world to her, she crossed the dimly lit hall between dining-room and drawing-room and came into the dreamland of moonlight upon the lawn. She had told her mother she was going upstairs; at any moment she might be missed, but she would have fled now to Trafford if an army pursued her. Her heart seemed beating in her throat, and every fibre of her being was aquiver. She flitted past the dining-room window like a ghost, she did not dare to glance aside at the smokers within, and round the lawn to the shrubbery, and so under a blackness of trees to the gate where he stood waiting. And there he was, dim and mysterious and wonderful, holding the gate open for her, and she was breathless, and speechless, and near sobbing. She stood before him for a moment, her face moonlit and laced with the shadows of little twigs, and then his armscame out to her.
"My darling," he said, "Oh, my darling!"
They had no doubt of one another or of anything in the world. They clung together; their lips came together fresh and untainted as those first lovers' in the garden.
"I will die for you," he said, "I will give all the world for you...."
They had thought all through the day of a hundred statements and explanations they would make when this moment came, and never a word of it all was uttered. All their anticipations of a highly strung eventful conversation vanished, phrases of the most striking sort went like phantom leaves before a gale. He held her and she clung to him between laughing and sobbing, and both were swiftly and conclusively assured their lives must never separate again.
§ 13
Marjorie never knew whether it was a moment or an age before her father came upon them. He had decided to take a turn in the garden when Magnet could no longer restrain himself from joining the ladies, and he chanced to be stick in hand because that was his habit after twilight. So it was he found them. She heard his voice falling through love and moonlight like something that comes out of an immense distance.
"Good God!" he cried, "what next!"
But he still hadn't realized the worst.
"Daffy," he said, "what in the name of goodness——?"
Marjorie put her hands before her face too late.
"Good Lord!" he cried with a rising inflection,"it's Madge!"
Trafford found the situation difficult. "I should explain——"
But Mr. Pope was giving himself up to a towering rage. "You damned scoundrel!" he said. "What the devil are you doing?" He seized Marjorie by the arm and drew her towards him. "My poor misguided girl!" he said, and suddenly she was tensely alive, a little cry of horror in her throat, for her father, at a loss for words and full of heroic rage, had suddenly swung his stick with passionate force, and struck at Trafford's face. She heard the thud, saw Trafford wince and stiffen. For a perfectly horrible moment it seemed to her these men, their faces queerly distorted by the shadows of the branches in the slanting moonlight, might fight. Then she heard Trafford's voice, sounding cool and hard, and she knew that he would do nothing of the kind. In that instant if there had remained anything to win in Marjorie it was altogether won. "I asked your daughter to meet me here," he said.
"Be off with you, sir!" cried Mr. Pope. "Don't tempt me further, sir," and swung his stick again. But now the force had gone out of him. Trafford stood with a hand out ready for him, and watched his face.
"I asked your daughter to meet me here, and she came. I am prepared to give you any explanation——"
"If you come near this place again——"
For some moments Marjorie's heart had been held still, now it was beating violently. She felt this scene must end. "Mr. Trafford," she said, "will you go. Go now. Nothing shall keep us apart!"
Mr. Pope turned on her. "Silence, girl!" he said.
"I shall come to you to-morrow," said Trafford.
"Yes," said Marjorie, "to-morrow."
"Marjorie!" said Mr. Pope, "willyou go indoors."
"I have done nothing——"
"Be off, sir."
"I have done nothing——"
"Will you be off, sir? And you, Marjorie—will you go indoors?"
He came round upon her, and after one still moment of regard for Trafford—and she looked very beautiful in the moonlight with her hair a little disordered and her face alight—she turned to precede her father through the shrubbery.
Mr. Pope hesitated whether he should remain with Trafford.
A perfectly motionless man is very disconcerting.
"Be off, sir," he said over his shoulder, lowered through a threatening second, and followed her.
But Trafford remained stiffly with a tingling temple down which a little thread of blood was running, until their retreating footsteps had died down into that confused stirring of little sounds which makes the stillness of an English wood at night.
Then he roused himself with a profound sigh, and put a hand to his cut and bruised cheek.
"Well!" he said.
§ 1
Crisis prevailed in Buryhamstreet that night. Onhalf a dozen sleepless pillows souls communed with the darkness, and two at least of those pillows were wet with tears.
Not one of those wakeful heads was perfectly clear about the origins and bearings of the trouble; not even Mr. Pope felt absolutely sure of himself. It had come as things come to people nowadays, because they will not think things out, much less talk things out, and are therefore in a hopeless tangle of values that tightens sooner or later to a knot....
What an uncharted perplexity, for example, was the mind of that excellent woman Mrs. Pope!
Poor lady! she hadn't a stable thing in her head. It is remarkable that some queer streak in her composition sympathized with Marjorie's passion for Trafford. But she thought it such a pity! She fought that sympathy down as if it were a wicked thing. And she fought too against other ideas that rose out of the deeps and did not so much come into her mind as cluster at the threshold, the idea that Marjorie was in effect grown up, a dozen queer criticisms of Magnet, and a dozen subtle doubts whether after all Marjorie was going to be happy with him as she assured herself the girl would be. (So far as any one knew Trafford might be an excellent match!) And behind these would-be invaders of her guarded mind prowled even worse ones, doubts, horrible disloyal doubts, about the wisdom and kindness of Mr. Pope.
Quite early in life Mrs. Pope had realized that itis necessary to be very careful with one's thoughts. They lead to trouble. She had clipped the wings of her own mind therefore so successfully that all her conclusions had become evasions, all her decisions compromises. Her profoundest working conviction was a belief that nothing in the world was of value but "tact," and that the art of living was to "tide things over." But here it seemed almost beyond her strength to achieve any sort of tiding over....
(Whycouldn'tMr. Pope lie quiet?)
Whatever she said or did had to be fitted to the exigencies of Mr. Pope.
Availing himself of the privileges of matrimony, her husband so soon as Mr. Magnet had gone and they were upstairs together, had explained the situation with vivid simplicity, and had gone on at considerable length and with great vivacity to enlarge upon his daughter's behaviour. He ascribed this moral disaster,—he presented it as a moral disaster of absolutely calamitous dimensions—entirely to Mrs. Pope's faults and negligences. Warming with his theme he had employed a number of homely expressions rarely heard by decent women except in these sacred intimacies, to express the deep indignation of a strong man moved to unbridled speech by the wickedness of those near and dear to him. Still warming, he raised his voice and at last shouted out his more forcible meanings, until she feared the servants and children might hear, waved a clenched fist at imaginary Traffords and scoundrels generally, and giving way completely to his outraged virtue, smote and kicked blameless articles of furniture in a manner deeply impressive to the feminine intelligence.
Finally he sat down in the little arm-chair betweenher and the cupboard where she was accustomed to hang up her clothes, stuck out his legs very stiffly across the room, and despaired of his family in an obtrusive and impregnable silence for an enormous time.
All of which awakened a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness in Mrs. Pope's mind, and prevented her going to bed, but did not help her in the slightest degree to grasp the difficulties of the situation....
She would have lain awake anyhow, but she was greatly helped in this by Mr. Pope's restlessness. He was now turning over from left to right or from right to left at intervals of from four to seven minutes, and such remarks as "Damned scoundrel! Get out of this!" or "Mydaughter and degrade yourself in this way!" or "Never let me see your face again!" "Plight your troth to one man, and fling yourself shamelessly—I repeat it, Marjorie, shamelessly—into the arms of another!" kept Mrs. Pope closely in touch with the general trend of his thoughts.
She tried to get together her plans and perceptions rather as though she swept up dead leaves on a gusty day. She knew that the management of the whole situation rested finally on her, and that whatever she did or did not do, or whatever arose to thwart her arrangements, its entire tale of responsibility would ultimately fall upon her shoulders. She wondered what was to be done with Marjorie, with Mr. Magnet? Need he know? Could that situation be saved? Everything at present was raw in her mind. Except for her husband's informal communications she did not even know what had appeared, what Daffy had seen, what Magnet thought of Marjorie's failure to bid him good-night. For example, had Mr. Magnet noticed Mr. Pope's profound disturbance? She had to be ready to put a face on thingsbefore morning, and it seemed impossible she could do so. In times of crisis, as every woman knows, it is always necessary to misrepresent everything to everybody, but how she was to dovetail her misrepresentations, get the best effect from them, extract a working system of rights and wrongs from them, she could not imagine....
(Oh! she did so wish Mr. Pope would lie quiet.)
But he had no doubts of what becamehim. He had to maintain a splendid and irrational rage—at any cost—to anybody.
§ 2
A few yards away, a wakeful Marjorie confronted a joyless universe. She had a baffling realization that her life was in a hopeless mess, that she really had behaved disgracefully, and that she couldn't for a moment understand how it had happened. She had intended to make quite sure of Trafford—and then put things straight.
Only her father had spoilt everything.
She regarded her father that night with a want of natural affection terrible to record. Why had he come just when he had, just as he had? Why had he been so violent, so impossible?
Of course, she had no business to be there....
She examined her character with a new unprecedented detachment. Wasn't she, after all, rather a mean human being? It had never occurred to her before to ask such a question. Now she asked it with only too clear a sense of the answer. She tried to trace how these multiplying threads of meanness had first come into the fabric of a life she had supposed herself to be weaving in extremely bright, honourable, and adventurous colours. She ought, of course,never to have accepted Magnet....
She faced the disagreeable word; was she a liar?
At any rate, she told lies.
And she'd behaved with extraordinary meanness to Daphne. She realized that now. She had known, as precisely as if she had been told, how Daphne felt about Trafford, and she'd never given her an inkling of her own relations. She hadn't for a moment thought of Daphne. No wonder Daffy was sombre and bitter. Whatever she knew, she knew enough. She had heard Trafford's name in urgent whispers on the landing. "I suppose you couldn't leave him alone," Daffy had said, after a long hostile silence. That was all. Just a sentence without prelude or answer flung across the bedroom, revealing a perfect understanding—deeps of angry disillusionment. Marjorie had stared and gasped, and made no answer.
Would she ever see him again? After this horror of rowdy intervention? She didn't deserve to; she didn't deserve anything.... Oh, the tangle of it all! The tangle of it all! And those bills at Oxbridge! She was just dragging Trafford down into her own miserable morass of a life.
Her thoughts would take a new turn. "I love him," she whispered soundlessly. "I would die for him. I would like to lie under his feet—and him not know it."
Her mind hung on that for a long time. "Not know it until afterwards," she corrected.
She liked to be exact, even in despair....
And then in her memory he was struck again, and stood stiff and still. She wanted to kneel to him, imagined herself kneeling....
And so on, quite inconclusively, round and round through the interminable night hours.
§ 3
The young man in the village was, if possible,more perplexed, round-eyed and generally inconclusive than anyone else in this series of nocturnal disturbances. He spent long intervals sitting on his window-sill regarding a world that was scented with nightstock, and seemed to be woven of moonshine and gossamer. Being an inexpert and infrequent soliloquist, his only audible comment on his difficulties was the repetition in varying intonations of his fervent, unalterable conviction that he was damned. But behind this simple verbal mask was a great fury of mental activity.
He had something of Marjorie's amazement at the position of affairs.
He had never properly realized that it was possible for any one to regard Marjorie as a daughter, to order her about and resent the research for her society as criminal. It was a new light in his world. Some day he was to learn the meaning of fatherhood, but in these night watches he regarded it as a hideous survival of mediæval darknesses.
"Of course," he said, entirely ignoring the actual quality of their conversation, "she had to explain about the Magnet affair. Can't one—converse?"
He reflected through great intervals.
"Iwillsee her! Why on earth shouldn't I see her?"
"I suppose they can't lock her up!"
For a time he contemplated a writ of Habeas Corpus. He saw reason to regret the gaps in his legal knowledge.
"Can any one get a writ of Habeas Corpus for any one—it doesn't matter whom"—more especially if you are a young man of six-and-twenty, anxious to exchange a few richly charged words witha girl of twenty who is engaged to someone else?
The night had no answer.
It was nearly dawn when he came to the entirely inadvisable conclusion—I use his own word's—to go and have it out with the old ruffian. He would sit down and ask him what he meant by it all—and reason with him. If he started flourishing that stick again, it would have to be taken away.
And having composed a peroration upon the institution of the family of a character which he fondly supposed to be extraordinarily tolerant, reasonable and convincing, but which was indeed calculated to madden Mr. Pope to frenzy, Mr. Trafford went very peacefully to sleep.
§ 4
Came dawn, with a noise of birds and afterwards a little sleep, and then day, and heavy eyes opened again, and the sound of frying and the smell of coffee recalled our actors to the stage. Mrs. Pope was past her worst despair; always the morning brings courage and a clearer grasp of things, and she could face the world with plans shaped subconsciously during those last healing moments of slumber.
Breakfast was difficult, but not impossible. Mr. Pope loomed like a thundercloud, but Marjorie pleaded a headache very wisely, and was taken a sympathetic cup of tea. The pseudo-twins scented trouble, but Theodore was heedless and over-full of an entertaining noise made by a moorhen as it dived in the ornamental water that morning. You could make it practicallysotto voce, and it amused Syd. He seemed to think theTimesopaque to such small sounds, and learnt better only to be dismissed underfedand ignominiously from the table to meditate upon the imperfections of his soul in the schoolroom. There for a time he was silent, and then presently became audible again, playing with a ball and, presumably, Marjorie's tennis racquet.
Directly she could disentangle herself from breakfast Mrs. Pope, with all her plans acute, went up to the girls' room. She found her daughter dressing in a leisurely and meditative manner. She shut the door almost confidentially. "Marjorie," she said, "I want you to tell me all about this."
"I thought I heard father telling you," said Marjorie.
"He was too indignant," said Mrs. Pope, "to explain clearly. You see, Marjorie"—she paused before her effort—"he knows things—about this Professor Trafford."
"What things?" asked Marjorie, turning sharply.
"I don't know, my dear—and I can't imagine."
She looked out of the window, aware of Marjorie's entirely distrustful scrutiny.
"I don't believe it," said Marjorie.
"Don't believe what, dear?"
"Whatever he says."
"I wish I didn't," said Mrs. Pope, and turned. "Oh, Madge," she cried, "you cannot imagine how all this distresses me! I cannot—I cannot conceive how you came to be in such a position! Surely honour——! Think of Mr. Magnet, how good and patient he has been! You don't know that man. You don't know all he is, and all that it means to a girl. He is good and honourable and—pure. He is kindness itself. It seemed to me that you were to be so happy—rich, honoured."
She was overcome by a rush of emotion; she turnedto the bed and sat down.
"There!" she said desolately. "It's all ruined, shattered, gone."
Marjorie tried not to feel that her mother was right.
"If father hadn't interfered," she said weakly.
"Oh, don't, my dear, speak so coldly of your father! You don't know what he has to put up with. You don't know his troubles and anxieties—all this wretched business." She paused, and her face became portentous. "Marjorie, do you know if these railways go on as they are going he may have toeat into his capitalthis year. Just think of that, and the worry he has! And this last shame and anxiety!"
Her voice broke again. Marjorie listened with an expression that was almost sullen.
"But what is it," she asked, "that father knows about Mr. Trafford?"
"I don't know, dear. I don't know. But it's something that matters—that makes it all different."
"Well, may I speak to Mr. Trafford before he leaves Buryhamstreet?"
"My dear! Never see him, dear—never think of him again! Your father would not dream——Some day, Marjorie, you will rejoice—you will want to thank your father on your bended knees that he saved you from the clutches of this man...."
"I won't believe anything about Mr. Trafford," she said slowly, "until I know——"
She left the sentence incomplete.
She made her declaration abruptly. "I love Mr. Trafford," she said, with a catch in her voice, "and I don't love Mr. Magnet."
Mrs. Pope received this like one who is suddenly stabbed. She sat still as if overwhelmed, one hand pressed to her side and her eyes closed. Then shesaid, as if she gasped involuntarily—
"It's too dreadful! Marjorie," she said, "I want to ask you to do something. After all, a mother hassomeclaim. Will you wait just a little. Will you promise me to do nothing—nothing, I mean, to commit you—until your father has been able to make inquiries. Don'tseehim for a little while. Very soon you'll be one-and-twenty, and then perhaps things may be different. If he cares for you, and you for him, a little separation won't matter.... Until your father has inquired...."
"Mother," said Marjorie, "I can't——"
Mrs. Pope drew in the air sharply between her teeth, as if in agony.
"But, mother——Mother, Imustlet Mr. Trafford know that I'm not to see him. Ican'tsuddenly cease.... If I could see him once——"
"Don't!" said Mrs. Pope, in a hollow voice.
Marjorie began weeping. "He'd not understand," she said. "If I might just speak to him!"
"Not alone, Marjorie."
Marjorie stood still. "Well—before you."
Mrs. Pope conceded the point. "And then, Marjorie——" she said.
"I'd keep my word, mother," said Marjorie, and began to sob in a manner she felt to be absurdly childish—"until—until I am one-and-twenty. I'd promise that."
Mrs. Pope did a brief calculation. "Marjorie," she said, "it's only your happiness I think of."
"I know," said Marjorie, and added in a low voice, "and father."
"My dear, you don't understand your father.... I believe—I do firmly believe—if anything happened to any of you girls—anything bad—he would kill himself.... And I know he means that you aren'tto go about so much as you used to do, unless we have the most definite promises. Of course, your father's ideas aren't always my ideas, Marjorie; but it's your duty—You know how hasty he is and—quick. Just as you know how good and generous and kind he is"—she caught Marjorie's eye, and added a little lamely—"at bottom." ... She thought. "I think I could get him to let you say just one word with Mr. Trafford. It would be very difficult, but——"
She paused for a few seconds, and seemed to be thinking deeply.
"Marjorie," she said, "Mr. Magnet must never know anything of this."
"But, mother——!"
"Nothing!"
"I can't go on with my engagement!"
Mrs. Pope shook her head inscrutably.
"But howcanI, mother?"
"You need not tell himwhy, Marjorie."
"But——"
"Just think how it would humiliate and distress him! Youcan't, Marjorie. You must find some excuse—oh, any excuse! But not the truth—not the truth, Marjorie. It would be too dreadful."
Marjorie thought. "Look here, mother, Imaysee Mr. Trafford again? Imayreally speak to him?"
"Haven't I promised?"
"Then, I'll do as you say," said Marjorie.
§ 5
Mrs. Pope found her husband seated at the desk in the ultra-Protestant study, meditating gloomily.
"I've been talking to her," she said, "She's in a state of terrible distress."
"She ought to be," said Mr. Pope.
"Philip, you don't understand Marjorie."
"I don't."
"You think she was kissing that man."
"Well, she was."
"You can thinkthatof her!"
Mr. Pope turned his chair to her. "But Isaw!"
Mrs. Pope shook her head. "She wasn't; she was struggling to get away from him. She told me so herself. I've been into it with her. You don't understand, Philip. A man like that has a sort of fascination for a girl. He dazzles her. It's the way with girls. But you're quite mistaken.... Quite. It's a sort of hypnotism. She'll grow out of it. Of course, shelovesMr. Magnet. She does indeed. I've not a doubt of it. But——"
"You'resureshe wasn't kissing him?"
"Positive."
"Then why didn't you say so?"
"A girl's so complex. You didn't give her a chance. She's fearfully ashamed of herself—fearfully! but it's just because sheisashamed that she won't admit it."
"I'll make her admit it."
"You ought to have had all boys," said Mrs. Pope. "Oh! she'll admit it some day—readily enough. But I believe a girl of her spirit would ratherdiethan begin explaining. You can't expect it of her. Really you can't."
He grunted and shook his head slowly from side to side.
She sat down in the arm-chair beside the desk.
"I want to know just exactly what we are to do about the girl, Philip. I can't bear to think of her—up there."