CHAPTER XXIII.
‘Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow.’
An embarrassed silence falls upon the group she leaves behind her. It had not occurred to them that she would care so much. They had often chaffed her before. It must—it must have been Mr. Crosby’s being there that had put her out like that. To tell the truth, they are all penitent—Betty perhaps more than the others. But even her remorse sinks into insignificance before Jacky’s. His takes the nature of a wrathful attack upon the others, and ends in a storm of tears.
‘You’ve been teasing her, you know you have—and she’s mad with me now. And I didn’t mean anything. And she’s crying, Iknow she is. And you’re all beasts—beasts!’
It is at this point that his own tears break forth, and, like Susan, he flees from them—but, unlike Susan, howling.
‘I didn’t know; I didn’t think she’d care,’ says Betty, in a frightened tone. ‘We often teased her before;’ and she might have said more, but an attack of sneezing lays her low.
‘But before a stranger!’ says Carew anxiously. ‘I am afraid, Mr. Crosby, it is because you were here.’
‘It isn’t a bit like Susan to care like that,’ says Dom. ‘I say’—contritely—‘I’m awfully sorry. I wonder where she is, Betty.’
‘In the summer-house. She always goes there when she’s vexed or worried.’
‘Why don’t you go to her, then?’
‘I can’t. I’ve a cold. I’ll wait awhile,’ says Betty, holding back.
‘I think, as it has been my fault,’ says Crosby quietly, ‘that I had better be the one to apologize. Where is this summer-house of which you speak?’
‘Right round there,’ says Betty eagerly, pointing to the corner of the house.
‘Just behind the rose-trees,’ says Dom, giving him a friendly push forward.
‘You can’t miss her,’ says Carew, who is dying to give him an encouraging clap on the shoulder. They are all evidently very anxious to get the task of ‘making it up’ with Susan on to any other shoulders than their own.
‘Well, I think I’ll take a little hostage with me, or shall we say a peace-offering?’ says Crosby, catching up Bonnie, and starting with him for Susan’s hiding-place. ‘Any way, I’ve got a pioneer,’ says he. ‘He’ll show me the way.’
The way is short and very sweet. Along a gravelled pathway, between trees of glowing roses, to where in the distance is a tiny house, made evidently by young, untutored hands, out of young and very unseasoned timber.
A slender figure is inside it—a figure flung miserably into one of the corners, andcrying perhaps, after all, more angrily than painfully.
‘Now, what on earth are you doing that for?’ says Crosby. He seats himself on the rustic bench beside her, and places Bonnie on her knee. It seems to him that that will be the best way to bring down her hands from her eyes. And he is not altogether wrong. It is impossible to let her little beloved one fall off her knees, so quickly, if reluctantly, she brings down her right hand so as to clasp him securely.
‘What are you crying about?’ goes on Crosby, very proud of the success of his first manœuvre. ‘Because somebody wanted to kiss you? You will have a good deal of crying at that rate, Susan, before you come to the end of your life.’
He is laughing a little now, and as Bonnie has climbed up on her knees, and is pulling away the other hand from her face, Susan feels she may as well make the best of a bad situation.
‘It wasn’t so much that,’ says she.‘Though’—anxiously—‘Jacky exaggerated most dreadfully. As to my objecting to their teasing me about James McIlveagh—you have not seen him, or you would understand me better. It is not only that he is uninteresting, but that he is awful! His nose is like an elephant’s trunk, and his eyes are as small as the head of a pin. And his clothes—his trousers—I don’t know where he got his trousers, but Dom used to say his mother made them in her spare moments. Not that one would care about a person’s trousers, of course,’ says Susan, with intense earnestness, ‘if he was nice himself; but James wasn’t nice, and I was never more glad in my life than when he went away.’
‘He’s coming back, however.’
‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry for it, if they are going to tease me all day long about him, as they are doing now. I think’—with a hasty glance at him, born of the fact that she knows her eyes are disfigured by crying—‘you might have tried to stop them.’
‘Well, you see, I hardly knew what to doat first,’ says Crosby, quite entering into the argument. ‘And when I did, it was a little too late. Of course it seemed to me a very possible thing that you might have given your heart to this young man with the nose and the unfortunate trousers who is stewing in the Soudan.’
‘You might have known by my manner that I hated them to tease me about him,’ says Susan, very little appeased by his apology.
‘I’ll know better next time,’ says Crosby humbly. ‘But when I heard he had been following you about like a baa-lamb, and that you had taken that anchor from him, and that he used to—’
He is checked by a flash from Susan’s eyes. There is a pause. Then suddenly she presses her face into Bonnie’s flaxen hair, and bursts into smothered laughter.
‘Well, I don’t care! He did once, all round the gooseberry bushes; and I threw a spade at him, and it hit him on the head, and I thought I had killed him. I’—withanother glance at Crosby, now from between Bonnie’s curls—‘was dreadfully frightened then. But now I almost wish I had. Any way, he never tried to—he never, I mean’—confusedly—‘hunted me again.’
‘I begin to feel sincerely sorry for James,’ says Crosby. ‘He seems to me to have led but a sorry life before he started for the Soudan. When he comes home next year, what will you do? He may be quite’—he looks at her and smiles—‘a mighty hunter by that time.’
Susan laughs.
‘Like you,’ says she.
Crosby looks at her. It is a ready answer, and with another might convey a certain meaning, but with Susan never.
‘Ah, I’m afraid of gooseberry bushes,’ says he. ‘They have thorns in them. James, you see, surpasses me in valour. Talking of valour reminds me of those you have left behind you, and who have sent me here as their plenipotentiary, to extract from you a promise of peace. They are all very sorrythey annoyed you so much about the redoubtable James; and they desired me to say so. I was afraid to come by myself, so I brought Bonnie with me. Bonnie, tell her to come back with me now, and say: “Peace is restored with honour.” Say it for her, Bonnie.’
‘“Peace is restored with honour,”’ repeats Bonnie sweetly.
‘There, that settles it,’ says Crosby. ‘He knows his lesson. So do you; come back and forgive us all.’
‘Oh, I can’t,’ says Susan. ‘They would know I had been crying. Look at my eyes; they are quite red.’
‘They are not, indeed,’ says Mr. Crosby, after an exhaustive examination. ‘They are quite blue.’
‘Oh yes, that, of course’—impatiently. ‘But, well—really, how are they?’ She leans towards him, and gazes at him out of the blue eyes with an extraordinary calm. ‘Would they know I had been crying?’
‘They would not,’ says Crosby. ‘It is Ialone who am in that secret. And, by the way, Susan’—stopping her as they both rise—‘that is the second secret we have between us; we are becoming quite fashionable—we are growing into a society, you and I.’
‘I wish you would forget that first secret,’ says Susan, blushing a little. ‘And, anyhow, I hope you won’t tell the others that you found me—you know—crying.’
‘Ah, that makes me remember our first secret,’ says Crosby. ‘You know that on that never-to-be-forgotten memorable occasion you said you trusted me.’
‘Did I?’ Susan is blushing furiously now. ‘How can I recollect all the silly things I said then? I have forgotten them all—and I’m sure you have, too.’
‘Not one of them,’ says Crosby. ‘They are now classed with my most priceless memories. “Go and steal no more,” you said—and I haven’t up to this.’
Susan laughs in spite of herself.
‘Well, at all events I can trust you, then,not to betray me to them.’ She points to the late temple of her tears.
‘You can trust me for that or anything else in the wide world,’ says Crosby.
He takes up Bonnie again, and they go slowly back to the others.