CHAPTER XXVI
Wherein Tom Folly blunders along in his Self-centred Gig—and drags a Dainty Little Lady’s Skirts into the Wheel
Anthonyfretted at the death of the Major—fretted at the publicity—fretted at the time of the man’s dying, and the manner; for he had decided to appeal to Betty not to spoil Noll’s prospects, now so suddenly brightening, by getting him entangled in a childish engagement. But Modeyne’s death made it wholly indecent to approach the already so indecent subject for some time; made it in any case the more difficult to broach at all; made it also more urgent that it should be approached. And, to fret the will with further indecision, Anthony, his eyes intent upon the pale girl in the simple black gown, and balked by the strange gravity that had settled upon the slim dainty figure, perceived the exquisite approach, the delicate fragrance and most subtle atmosphere of the coming of womanhood—an atmosphere which made it doubly difficult for him to commit himself to putting into the brutality of speech what cost him shame even in the thinking.
Had he only taken Caroline into his scheme, he would not have blundered thus clumsily into a brutality; but he did not—and, with his fatal capacity for not leaving well alone, fretting impatiently through the keen bitter winds of March and the early days of April, he at last brought himself to the pitch of seeing the girl alone and making his appeal.
When Anthony knocked at the door and entered her room, she arose, with a smile, to greet him; and he found himself mute.
She was so comely, this slender girl of fifteen years, so debonair—as is meet and fit in the young of the most beautiful of all created things. The brown hair, tied with a ribbon at the nape of the white neck, showed the great beauty of the shapely head; and he knew that the soul within the delicate body was the most mystically beautiful of all. He realized that the slightest cruelty would leave harsh scars. Yet he did not withhold himself from the brutalities.
She would have made him at ease so prettily; and he decided to be blunt and strike at once, if he would say what he had come to say.
“Betty,” said he, “I have come to say a thing which it hurts me to the quick to say; which of course must wound you even more. Don’t make it an added bitterness to me by being too much your dainty self—rather be unpleasant—if you can.”
The light went out of the trustful grey eyes; the smile flickered out and slowly left the pure face. The slender hands trembled a little—the large eyelids fell, and she bowed her comely head. She wondered what new agony lay in store for her.
Thus she stood and said never a word. Just one little movement—the interlacing of the slender fingers together before her—it hid the trembling of the white hands—and she prepared to meet what cut of the lash should fall, in silent dignity.
Anthony was taken up with his own difficulty,—yet, as he spoke, the picture of the girl’s humiliation slowly bit into his imagination.
“Betty,” he said, “I do not know whether you are aware of it, but there are only two people between Noll, through his mother, and Lord Wyntwarde of Cavil....” The lash cut deep, but he was too engrossed in his object to see the girl’s courage. “Lord Wyntwarde is, frankly, somewhat of a brute—capricious, full of whims. He has, after ignoring the boy from his birth, suddenly expressed a wish that Noll should go to Oxford, a wish also to provide a career for him—such as—I—cannot give him.... He has made, as one of his conditions, a most binding proviso that Noll shall not marry without his consent, nor outside his set——”
The girl spake no smallest word, gave no sign.
Anthony went on:
“I am going to ask you not to spoil Noll’s career——”
The words cut into the girl’s very flesh; but she said not a word.
Anthony blundered on, brutally unconscious of the simple urgent fact that the girl had not wanted to spoil the lad’s career, that she was in no way on her defence—that he was committing himself to the base insolence, the most ignoble insolence of which we can be guilty, of the lie that presumes the accusation of the innocent. It were as though indifferent cutlery should beg tempered steel to try and be tempered steel.
“You are very beautiful,” he said—“you probably do not realize how beautiful. And I am going to appeal to you not to allow Noll to get engaged to you in case he should wish it—for it would be folly in me to pretend that I don’t see that he has a boy’s love for you, which, if other things were different, God knows would be the happiest thing for him.”
So he blundered on, excusing the girl from his own insolences; even making all allowances for her out of the deeps of his self-sufficiency.
Betty’s fingers remained tight clasped before her—her head bowed down—but she made no slightest movement, standing deathly still.
And Anthony, his false step irretrievably made, realized slowly that he had done a brutal and foolish thing; saw perhaps even more clearly that he had won a success; but, rebuffed by the girl’ssilence at last, and embarrassed and not without a suspicion of shame, he slowly retired from the room.
The door closed upon him.
The girl was left utterly alone.
A hot flush had burnt into her face.
She stretched out her hand and with difficulty reached the mantel.
They had now turned even her deep love for this youth, the only being left to her, into a thing to bring her shame. It was the whip of scorpions.
She had stood and taken the lashes upon her slender shoulders; but at last the hellish device that invented the punishment of the solitary cell wrung from her lips a pathetic little moan.