Men serve women kneeling; when they get on their feet they goaway.
Guy Oscard stood for a moment on the threshold. He heard the door close behind him, and he took two steps farther forward.
Jack Meredith and Millicent were at the fireplace. There was a heap of disordered paper and string upon the table, and a few wedding presents standing in the midst of their packing.
Millicent's pretty face was quite white. She looked from Meredith to Oscard with a sudden horror in her eyes. For the first time in her life she was at a loss—quite taken aback.
“Oh-h!” she whispered, and that was all.
The silence that followed was tense as if something in the atmosphere was about to snap; and in the midst of it the wheels of Sir John's retreating carriage came to the ears of the three persons in the drawing-room.
It was only for a moment, but in that moment the two men saw clearly. It was as if the veil from the girl's mind had fallen—leaving her thoughts confessed, bare before them. In the same instant they both saw—they both sped back in thought to their first meeting, to the hundred links of the chain that brought them to the present moment—they KNEW; and Millicent felt that they knew.
“Are YOU going to be married to-morrow?” asked Guy Oscard deliberately. He never was a man to whom a successful appeal for the slightest mitigation of justice could have been made. His dealings had ever been with men, from whom he had exacted as scrupulous an honour as he had given. He did not know that women are different—that honour is not their strong point.
Millicent did not answer. She looked to Meredith to answer for her; but Meredith was looking at Oscard, and in his lazy eyes there glowed the singular affection and admiration which he had bestowed long time before on this simple gentleman—his mental inferior.
“Are YOU going to be married to-morrow?” repeated Oscard, standing quite still, with a calmness that frightened her.
“Yes,” she answered rather feebly.
She knew that she could explain it all. She could have explained it to either of them separately, but to both together, somehow it was difficult. Her mind was filled with clamouring arguments and explanations and plausible excuses; but she did not know which to select first. None of them seemed quite equal to this occasion. These men required something deeper, and stronger, and simpler than she had to offer them.
Moreover, she was paralysed by a feeling that was quite new to her—a horrid feeling that something had gone from her. She had lost her strongest, her single arm: her beauty. This seemed to have fallen from her. It seemed to count for nothing at this time. There is a time that comes as surely as death will come in the life of every beautiful woman—a time wherein she suddenly realises how trivial a thing her beauty is—how limited, how useless, how ineffectual!
Millicent Chyne made a little appealing movement towards Meredith, who relentlessly stepped back. It was the magic of the love that filled his heart for Oscard. Had she wronged any man in the world but Guy Oscard, that little movement—full of love and tenderness and sweet contrition—might have saved her. But it was Oscard's heart that she had broken; for broken they both knew it to be, and Jack Meredith stepped back from her touch as from pollution. His superficial, imagined love for her had been killed at a single blow. Her beauty was no more to him at that moment than the beauty of a picture.
“Oh, Jack!” she gasped; and had there been another woman in the room that woman would have known that Millicent loved him with the love that comes once only. But men are not very acute in such matters—they either read wrong or not at all.
“It is all a mistake,” she said breathlessly, looking from one to the other.
“A most awkward mistake,” suggested Meredith, with a cruel smile that made her wince.
“Mr. Oscard must have mistaken me altogether,” the girl went on, volubly addressing herself to Meredith—she wanted nothing from Oscard. “I may have been silly, perhaps, or merely ignorant and blind. How was I to know that he meant what he said?”
“How, indeed?” agreed Meredith, with a grave bow.
“Besides, he has no business to come here bringing false accusations against me. He has no right—it is cruel and ungentlemanly. He cannot prove anything; he cannot say that I ever distinctly gave him to understand—er, anything—that I ever promised to be engaged or anything like that.”
She turned upon Oscard, whose demeanour was stolid, almost dense. He looked very large and somewhat difficult to move.
“He has not attempted to do so yet,” suggested Jack suavely, looking at his friend.
“I do not see that it is quite a question of proofs,” said Oscard quietly, in a voice that did not sound like his at all. “We are not in a court of justice, where ladies like to settle these questions now. If we were I could challenge you to produce my letters. There is no doubt of my meaning in them.”
“There are also my poor contributions to—your collection,” chimed in Jack Meredith. “A comparison must have been interesting to you, by the same mail presumably, under the same postmark.”
“I made no comparison,” the girl cried defiantly. “There was no question of comparison.”
She said it shamelessly, and it hurt Meredith more than it hurt Guy Oscard, for whom the sting was intended.
“Comparison or no comparison,” said Jack Meredith quickly, with the keenness of a good fencer who has been touched, “there can be no doubt of the fact that you were engaged to us both at the same time. You told us both to go out and make a fortune wherewith to buy—your affections. One can only presume that the highest bidder—the owner of the largest fortune—was to be the happy man. Unfortunately we became partners, and—such was the power of your fascination—we made the fortune; but we share and share alike in that. We are equal, so far as the—price is concerned. The situation is interesting and rather—amusing. It is your turn to move. We await your further instructions in considerable suspense.”
She stared at him with bloodless lips. She did not seem to understand what he was saying. At last she spoke, ignoring Guy Oscard's presence altogether.
“Considering that we are to be married to-morrow, I do not think that you should speak to me like that,” she said with a strange, concentrated eagerness.
“Pardon me, we are not going to be married to-morrow.”
Her brilliant teeth closed on her lower lip with a snap, and she stood looking at him, breathing so hard that the sound was almost a sob.
“What do you mean?” she whispered hoarsely.
He raised his shoulders in polite surprise at her dulness of comprehension.
“In the unfortunate circumstances in which you are placed,” he explained, “it seems to me that the least one can do is to offer every assistance in one's power. Please consider me hors de concours. In a word—I scratch.”
She gasped like a swimmer swimming for life. She was fighting for that which some deem dearer than life—namely, her love. For it is not only the good women who love, though these understand it best and see farther into it.
“Then you can never have cared for me,” she cried. “All that you have told me,” and her eyes flashed triumphantly across Oscard, “all that you promised and vowed was utterly false—if you turn against me at the first word of a man who was carried away by his own vanity into thinking things that he had no business to think.”
If Guy Oscard was no great adept at wordy warfare, he was at all events strong in his reception of punishment. He stood upright and quiescent, betraying by neither sign nor movement that her words could hurt him.
“I beg to suggest again,” said Jack composedly, “that Oscard has not yet brought any accusations against you. You have brought them all yourself.”
“You are both cruel and cowardly,” she exclaimed, suddenly descending to vituperation. “Two to one. Two men—GENTLEMEN—against one defenceless girl. Of course I am not able to argue with you. Of course you can get the best of me. It is so easy to be sarcastic.”
“I do not imagine,” retorted Jack, “that anything that we can say or do will have much permanent power of hurting you. For the last two years you have been engaged in an—intrigue, such as a thin-skinned or sensitive person would hardly of her own free will undertake. You may be able to explain it to yourself—no doubt you are—but to our more limited comprehensions it must remain inexplicable. We can only judge from appearances.”
“And of course appearances go against me—they always do against a woman,” she cried rather brokenly.
“You would have been wise to have taken that peculiarity into consideration sooner,” replied Jack Meredith coldly. “I admit that I am puzzled; I cannot quite get at your motive. Presumably it is one of those—SWEET feminine inconsistencies which are so charming in books.”
There was a little pause. Jack Meredith waited politely to hear if she had anything further to say. His clean-cut face was quite pallid; the suppressed anger in his eyes was perhaps more difficult to meet than open fury. The man who never forgets himself before a woman is likely to be an absolute master of women.
“I think,” he added, “that there is nothing more to be said.”
There was a dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard. He could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. But, unfortunately, he was only a human being—a man who was ready to give as full a measure as he exacted. The unfortunate mistake to which he clung was that the same sense of justice, the same code of honour, must serve for men and women alike. So Millicent Chyne looked in vain for that indulgence which is so inconsistently offered to women, merely because they are women—the indulgence which is sometimes given and sometimes withheld, according to the softness of the masculine heart and the beauty of the suppliant feminine form. Guy Oscard was quite sure of his own impressions. This girl had allowed him to begin loving her, had encouraged him to go on, had led him to believe that his love was returned. And in his simple ignorance of the world he did not see why these matters should be locked up in his own breast from a mistaken sense of chivalry to be accorded where no chivalry was due.
“No,” he answered. “There is nothing more to be said.”
Without looking towards her, Jack Meredith made a few steps towards the door—quietly, self-composedly, with that perfect savoir-faire of the social expert that made him different from other men. Millicent Chyne felt a sudden plebeian desire to scream. It was all so heartlessly well-bred. He turned on his heel with a little half-cynical bow.
“I leave my name with you,” he said. “It is probable that you will be put to some inconvenience. I can only regret that this—denouement did not come some months ago. You are likely to suffer more than I, because I do not care what the world thinks of me. Therefore you may tell the world what you choose about me—that I drink, that I gamble, that I am lacking in—honour! Anything that suggests itself to you, in fact. You need not go away; I will do that.”
She listened with compressed lips and heaving shoulders; and the bitterest drop in her cup was the knowledge that he despised her. During the last few minutes he had said and done nothing that lowered him in her estimation—that touched in any way her love for him. He had not lowered himself in any way, but he had suavely trodden her under foot. His last words—the inexorable intention of going away—sapped her last lingering hope. She could never regain even a tithe of his affection.
“I think,” he went on, “that you will agree with me in thinking that Guy Oscard's name must be kept out of this entirely. I give you carte blanche except that.”
With a slight inclination of the head he walked to the door. It was characteristic of him that although he walked slowly he never turned his head nor paused.
Oscard followed him with the patient apathy of the large and mystified.
And so they left her—amidst the disorder of the half-unpacked wedding presents—amidst the ruin of her own life. Perhaps, after all, she was not wholly bad. Few people are; they are only bad enough to be wholly unsatisfactory and quite incomprehensible. She must have known the risk she was running, and yet she could not stay her hand. She must have known long before that she loved Jack Meredith, and that she was playing fast and loose with the happiness of her whole life. She knew that hundreds of girls around her were doing the same, and, with all shame be it mentioned, not a few married women. But they seemed to be able to carry it through without accident or hindrance. And illogically, thoughtlessly, she blamed her own ill-fortune.
She stood looking blankly at the door which had closed behind three men—one old and two young—and perhaps she realised the fact that such creatures may be led blindly, helplessly, with a single hair, but that that hair may snap at any moment.
She was not thinking of Guy Oscard. Him she had never loved. He had only been one of her experiments, and by his very simplicity—above all, by his uncompromising honesty—he had outwitted her.
It was characteristic of her that at that moment she scarcely knew the weight of her own remorse. It sat lightly on her shoulders then, and it was only later on, when her beauty began to fade, when years came and brought no joy for the middle-aged unmarried woman, that she began to realise what it was that she had to carry through life with her. At that moment a thousand other thoughts filled her mind—such thoughts as one would expect to find there. How was the world to be deceived? The guests would have to be put off—the wedding countermanded—the presents returned. And the world—her world—would laugh in its sleeve. There lay the sting.
Still must the man move sadlier for the dreamsThat mocked the boy.
“Where are you going?” asked Meredith, when they were in the street.
“Home.”
They walked on a few paces together.
“May I come with you?” asked Meredith again.
“Certainly; I have a good deal to tell you.”
They called a cab, and singularly enough they drove all the way to Russell Square without speaking. These two men had worked together for many months, and men who have a daily task in common usually learn to perform it without much interchange of observation. When one man gets to know the mind of another, conversation assumes a place of secondary importance. These two had been through more incidents together than usually fall to the lot of man—each knew how the other would act and think under given circumstances; each knew what the other was thinking now.
The house in Russell Square, the quiet house in the corner where the cabs do not pass, was lighted up and astir when they reached it. The old butler held open the door with a smile of welcome and a faint aroma of whisky. The luggage had been discreetly removed. Joseph had gone to Mr. Meredith's chambers. Guy Oscard led the way to the smoking-room at the back of the house—the room wherein the eccentric Oscard had written his great history—the room in which Victor Durnovo had first suggested the Simiacine scheme to the historian's son.
The two survivors of the originating trio passed into this room together, and closed the door behind them.
“The worst of one's own private tragedies is that they are usually only comedies in disguise,” said Jack Meredith oracularly.
Guy Oscard grunted. He was looking for his pipe.
“If we heard this of any two fellows except ourselves we should think it an excellent joke,” went on Meredith.
Oscard nodded. He lighted his pipe, and still he said nothing.
“Hang it!” exclaimed Jack Meredith, suddenly throwing himself back in his chair, “it is a good joke.”
He laughed softly, and all the while his eyes, watchful, wise, anxious, were studying Guy Oscard's face.
“He is harder hit than I am,” he was reflecting. “Poor old Oscard!”
The habit of self-suppression was so strong upon him—acquired as a mere social duty—that it was only natural for him to think less of himself than of the expediency of the moment. The social discipline is as powerful an agent as that military discipline that makes a man throw away his own life for the good of the many.
Oscard laughed, too, in a strangely staccato manner.
“It is rather a sudden change,” observed Meredith; “and all brought about by your coming into that room at that particular moment—by accident.”
“Not by accident,” corrected Oscard, speaking at last. “I was brought there and pushed into the room.”
“By whom?”
“By your father.”
Jack Meredith sat upright. He drew his curved hand slowly down over his face—keen and delicate as was his mind—his eyes deep with thought.
“The Guv'nor,” he said slowly. “The Guv'nor—by God!”
He reflected for some seconds.
“Tell me how he did it,” he said curtly.
Oscard told him, rather incoherently, between the puffs. He did not attempt to make a story of it, but merely related the facts as they had happened to him. It is probable that to him the act was veiled which Jack saw quite distinctly.
“That is the sort of thing,” was Meredith's comment when the story was finished, “that takes the conceit out of a fellow. I suppose I have more than my share. I suppose it is good for me to find that I am not so clever as I thought I was—that there are plenty of cleverer fellows about, and that one of them is an old man of seventy-nine. The worst of it is that he was right all along. He saw clearly where you and I were—damnably blind.”
He rubbed his slim brown hands together, and looked across at his companion with a smile wherein the youthful self-confidence was less discernible than of yore. The smile faded as he looked at Oscard. He was thinking that he looked older and graver—more of a middle-aged man who has left something behind him in life—and the sight reminded him of the few grey hairs that were above his own temples.
“Come,” he said more cheerfully, “tell me your news. Let us change the subject. Let us throw aside light dalliance and return to questions of money. More important—much more satisfactory. I suppose you have left Durnovo in charge? Has Joseph come home with you?”
“Yes, Joseph has come home with me. Durnovo is dead.”
“Dead!”
Guy Oscard took his pipe from his lips.
“He died at Msala of the sleeping sickness. He was a bigger blackguard than we thought. He was a slave-dealer and a slave-owner. Those forty men we picked up at Msala were slaves belonging to him.”
“Ach!” It was a strange exclamation, as if he had burnt his fingers. “Who knows of this?” he asked immediately. The expediency of the moment had presented itself to his mind again.
“Only ourselves,” returned Oscard. “You, Joseph, and I.”
“That is all right, and the sooner we forget that the better. It would be a dangerous story to tell.”
“So I concluded,” said Oscard, in his slow, thoughtful way. “Joseph swears he won't breathe a word of it.”
Jack Meredith nodded. He looked rather pale beneath the light of the gas.
“Joseph is all right,” he said. “Go on.”
“It was Joseph who found it out,” continued Oscard, “up at the Plateau. I paraded the whole crowd, told them what I had found out, and chucked up the whole concern in your name and mine. Next morning I abandoned the Plateau with such men as cared to come. Nearly half of them stayed with Durnovo. I thought it was in order that they might share in the Simiacine—I told them they could have the whole confounded lot of the stuff. But it was not that; they tricked Durnovo there. They wanted to get him to themselves. In going down the river we had an accident with two of the boats, which necessitated staying at Msala. While we were waiting there, one night after ten o'clock the poor devil came, alone, in a canoe. They had simply cut him in slices—a most beastly sight. I wake up sometimes even now dreaming of it, and I am not a fanciful sort of fellow. Joseph went into his room and was simply sick; I didn't know that you could be made sick by anything you saw. The sleeping sickness was on Durnovo then; he had brought it with him from the Plateau. He died before morning.”
Oscard ceased speaking and returned to his pipe. Jack Meredith, looking haggard and worn, was leaning back in his chair.
“Poor devil!” he exclaimed. “There was always something tragic about Durnovo. I did hate that man, Oscard. I hated him and all his works.”
“Well, he's gone to his account now.”
“Yes, but that does not make him any better a man while he was alive. Don't let us cant about him now. The man was an unmitigated scoundrel—perhaps he deserved all he got.”
“Perhaps he did. He was Marie's husband.”
“The devil he was!”
Meredith fell into a long reverie. He was thinking of Jocelyn and her dislike for Durnovo, of the scene in the drawing-room of the bungalow at Loango; of a thousand incidents all connected with Jocelyn.
“How I hate that man!” he exclaimed at length. “Thank God—he is dead—because I should have killed him.”
Guy Oscard looked at him with a slow pensive wonder. Perhaps he knew more than Jack Meredith knew himself of the thoughts that conceived those words—so out of place in that quiet room, from those suave and courtly lips.
All the emotions of his life seemed to be concentrated into this one day of Jack Meredith's existence. Oscard's presence was a comfort to him—the presence of a calm, strong man is better than many words.
“So this,” he said, “is the end of the Simiacine. It did not look like a tragedy when we went into it.”
“So far as I am concerned,” replied Oscard, with quiet determination, “it certainly is the end of the Simiacine! I have had enough of it. I, for one, am not going to look for that Plateau again.”
“Nor I. I suppose it will be started as a limited liability company by a German in six months. Some of the natives will leave landmarks as they come down so as to find their way back.”
“I don't think so!”
“Why?”
Oscard took his pipe from his lips.
“When Durnovo came down to Msala,” he explained, “he had the sleeping sickness on him. Where did he get it from?”
“By God!” ejaculated Jack Meredith, “I never thought of that. He got it up at the Plateau. He left it behind him. They have got it up there now.”
“Not now—”
“What do you mean, Oscard?”
“Merely that all those fellows up there are dead. There is ninety thousand pounds worth of Simiacine packed ready for carrying to the coast, standing in a pile on the Plateau, and there are thirty-four dead men keeping watch over it.”
“Is it as infectious as that?”
“When it first shows itself, infectious is not the word. It is nothing but a plague. Not one of those fellows can have escaped.”
Jack Meredith sat forward and rubbed his two hands pensively over his knees.
“So,” he said, “only you and I and Joseph know where the Simiacine Plateau is.”
“That is so,” answered Oscard.
“And Joseph won't go back?”
“Not if you were to give him that ninety thousand pounds worth of stuff.”
“And you will not go back?”
“Not for nine hundred thousand pounds. There is a curse on that place.”
“I believe there is,” said Meredith.
And such was the end of the great Simiacine Scheme—the wonder of a few seasons. Some day, when the great Sahara is turned into an inland sea, when steamers shall ply where sand now flies before the desert wind, the Plateau may be found again. Some day, when Africa is cut from east to west by a railway line, some adventurous soul will scale the height of one of many mountains, one that seems no different from the rest and yet is held in awe by the phantom-haunted denizens of the gloomy forest, and there he will find a pyramid of wooden cases surrounded by bleached and scattered bones where vultures have fed.
In the meantime the precious drug will grow scarcer day by day, and the human race will be poorer by the loss of one of those half-matured discoveries which have more than once in the world's history been on the point of raising the animal called man to a higher, stronger, finer development of brain and muscle than we can conceive of under existing circumstances. Who can tell? Perhaps the strange solitary bush may be found growing elsewhere—in some other continent across the ocean. The ways of Nature are past comprehension, and no man can say who sows the seed that crops up in strange places. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and none can tell what germs it bears. It seems hardly credible that the Plateau, no bigger than a cricket field, far away in the waste land of Central Africa, can be the only spot on this planet where the magic leaf grows in sufficient profusion to supply suffering humanity with an alleviating drug, unrivalled—a strength-giving herb, unapproached in power. But as yet no other Simiacine has been found and the Plateau is lost.
And the end of it was two men who had gone to look for it two years before—young and hearty—returning from the search successful beyond their highest hopes, with a shadow in their eyes and grey upon their heads.
They sat for nearly two hours in that room in the quiet house in Russell Square, where the cabs do not pass; and their conversation was of money. They sat until they had closed the Simiacine account, never to be reopened. They discussed the question of renouncement, and, after due consideration, concluded that the gain was rightly theirs seeing that the risk had all been theirs. Slaves and slave-owner had both taken their cause to a Higher Court, where the defendant has no worry and the plaintiff is at rest. They were beyond the reach of money—beyond the glitter of gold—far from the cry of anguish. A fortune was set aside for Marie Durnovo, to be held in trust for the children of the man who had found the Simiacine Plateau; another was apportioned to Joseph.
“Seventy-seven thousand one hundred and four pounds for you,” said Jack Meredith at length, laying aside his pen, “seventy-seven thousand one hundred and four pounds for me.”
“And,” he added, after a little pause, “it was not worth it.”
Guy Oscard smoked his pipe and shook his head.
“Now,” said Jack Meredith, “I must go. I must be out of London by to-morrow morning. I shall go abroad—America or somewhere.”
He rose as he spoke, and Oscard made no attempt to restrain him.
They went out into the passage together. Oscard opened the door and followed his companion to the step.
“I suppose,” said Meredith, “we shall meet some time—somewhere?”
“Yes.”
They shook hands.
Jack Meredith went down the steps almost reluctantly. At the foot of the short flight he turned and looked up at the strong, peaceful form of his friend.
“What will you do?” he said.
“I shall go back to my big-game,” replied Guy Oscard. “I am best at that. But I shall not go to Africa.”
The life unlived, the deed undone, the tearUnshed.
“I rather expect—Lady Cantourne,” said Sir John to his servants when he returned home, “any time between now and ten o'clock.”
The butler, having a vivid recollection of an occasion when Lady Cantourne was shown into a drawing-room where there were no flowers, made his preparations accordingly. The flowers were set out with that masculine ignorance of such matters which brings a smile—not wholly of mirth—to a woman's face. The little-used drawing-room was brought under the notice of the housekeeper for that woman's touch which makes a drawing-room what it is. It was always ready—this room, though Sir John never sat in it. But for Lady Cantourne it was always more than ready.
Sir John went to the library and sat rather wearily down in the stiff-backed chair before the fire. He began by taking up the evening newspaper, but failed to find his eyeglasses, which had twisted up in some aggravating manner with his necktie. So he laid aside the journal and gave way to the weakness of looking into the fire.
Once or twice his head dropped forward rather suddenly, so that his clean-shaven chin touched his tie-pin, and this without a feeling of sleepiness warranting the relaxation of the spinal column. He sat up suddenly on each occasion and threw back his shoulders.
“Almost seems,” he muttered once, “as if I were getting to be an old man.”
After that he remembered nothing until the butler, coming in with the lamp, said that Lady Cantourne was in the drawing-room. The man busied himself with the curtains, carefully avoiding a glance in his master's direction. No one had ever found Sir John asleep in a chair during the hours that other people watch, and this faithful old servant was not going to begin to do so now.
“Ah,” said Sir John, surreptitiously composing his collar and voluminous necktie, “thank you.”
He rose and glanced at the clock. It was nearly seven. He had slept through the most miserable hour of Millicent Chyne's life.
At the head of the spacious staircase he paused in front of the mirror, half hidden behind exotics, and pressed down his wig behind either ear. Then he went into the drawing-room.
Lady Cantourne was standing impatiently on the hearthrug, and scarcely responded to his bow.
“Has Jack been here?” she asked.
“No.”
She stamped a foot, still neat despite its long journey over a road that had never been very smooth. Her manner was that of a commander-in-chief, competent but unfortunate, in the midst of a great reverse.
“He has not been here this afternoon?”
“No,” answered Sir John, closing the door behind him.
“And you have not heard anything from him?”
“Not a word. As you know, I am not fortunate enough to be fully in his confidence.”
Lady Cantourne glanced round the room as if looking for some object upon which to fix her attention. It was a characteristic movement which he knew, although he had only seen it once or twice before. It indicated that if there was an end to Lady Cantourne's wit, she had almost reached that undesirable bourne.
“He has broken off his engagement,” she said, looking her companion very straight in the face, “NOW—at the eleventh hour. Do you know anything about it?”
She came closer to him, looking up from her compact little five-feet-two with discerning eyes.
“John!” she exclaimed.
She came still nearer and laid her gloved hands upon his sleeve.
“John! you know something about this.”
“I should like to know more,” he said suavely. “I am afraid—Millicent will be inconvenienced.”
Lady Cantourne looked keenly at him for a moment. Physically she almost stood on tip-toe, mentally she did it without disguise. Then she turned away and sat on a chair which had always been set apart for her.
“It is a question,” she said gravely, “whether any one has a right to punish a woman so severely.”
The corner of Sir John's mouth twitched.
“I would rather punish her than have Jack punished for the rest of his life.”
“Et moi?” she snapped impatiently.
“Ah!” with a gesture learnt in some foreign court, “I can only ask your forgiveness. I can only remind you that she is not your daughter—if she were she would be a different woman—while he IS my son.”
Lady Cantourne nodded as if to indicate that he need explain no more.
“How did you do it?” she asked quietly.
“I did not do it. I merely suggested to Guy Oscard that he should call on you. Millicent and her fiance—the other—were alone in the drawing-room when we arrived. Thinking that I might be de trop I withdrew, and left the young people to settle it among themselves, which they have apparently done! I am, like yourself, a great advocate for allowing young people to settle things among themselves. They are also welcome to their enjoyment of the consequences so far as I am concerned.”
“But Millicent was never engaged to Guy Oscard.”
“Did she tell you so?” asked Sir John, with a queer smile.
“Yes.”
“And you believed her?”
“Of course—and you?”
Sir John smiled his courtliest smile.
“I always believe a lady,” he answered, “before her face. Mr. Guy Oscard gave it out in Africa that he was engaged to be married, and he even declared that he was returning home to be married. Jack did the same in every respect. Unfortunately there was only one fond heart waiting for the couple of them at home. That is why I thought it expedient to give the young people an opportunity of settling it between themselves.”
The smile left his worn old face. He moved uneasily and walked to the fireplace, where he stood with his unsteady hands moving idly, almost nervously, among the ornaments on the mantelpiece. He committed the rare discourtesy of almost turning his back upon a lady.
“I must ask you to believe,” he said, looking anywhere but at her, “that I did not forget you in the matter. I may seem to have acted with an utter disregard for your feelings—”
He broke off suddenly, and, turning, he stood on the hearthrug with his feet apart, his hands clasped behind his back, his head slightly bowed.
“I drew on the reserve of an old friendship,” he said. “You were kind enough to say the other day that you were indebted to me to some extent. You are indebted to me to a larger extent than you perhaps realise. You owe me fifty years of happiness—fifty years of a life that might have been happy had you decided differently when—when we were younger. I do not blame you now—I never have blamed you. But the debt is there—you know my life, you know almost every day of it—you cannot deny the debt. I drew upon that.”
And the white-haired woman raised her hand.
“Don't,” she said gently, “please don't say any more. I know all that your life has been, and why. You did quite right. What is a little trouble to me, a little passing inconvenience, the tattle of a few idle tongues, compared with what Jack's life is to you? I see now that I ought to have opposed it strongly instead of letting it take its course. You were right—you always have been right, John. There is a sort of consolation in the thought. I like it. I like to think that you were always right and that it was I who was wrong. It confirms my respect for you. We shall get over this somehow.”
“The young lady,” suggested Sir John, “will get over it after the manner of her kind. She will marry some one else, let us hope, before her wedding-dress goes out of fashion.”
“Millicent will have to get over it as she may. Her feelings need scarcely be taken into consideration.”
Lady Cantourne made a little movement towards the door. There was much to see to—much of that women's work which makes weddings the wild, confused ceremonies that they are.
“I am afraid,” said Sir John, “that I never thought of taking them into consideration. As you know, I hardly considered yours. I hope I have not overdrawn that reserve.”
He had crossed the room as he spoke to open the door for her. His fingers were on the handle, but he did not turn it, awaiting her answer. She did not look at him, but past him towards the shaded lamp with that desire to fix her attention upon some inanimate object which he knew of old.
“The reserve,” she answered, “will stand more than that. It has accumulated—with compound interest. But I deny the debt of which you spoke just now. There is no debt. I have paid it, year by year, day by day. For each one of those fifty years of unhappiness I have paid a year—of regret.”
He opened the door and she passed out into the brilliantly lighted passage and down the stairs, where the servants were waiting to open the door and help her to her carriage.
Sir John did not go downstairs with her.
Later on he dined in his usual solitary grandeur. He was as carefully dressed as ever. The discipline of his household—like the discipline under which he held himself—was unrelaxed.
“What wine is this?” he asked when he had tasted the port.
“Yellow seal, sir,” replied the butler confidentially.
Sir John sipped again.
“It is a new bin,” he said.
“Yes, sir. First bottle of the lower bin, sir.”
Sir John nodded with an air of self-satisfaction. He was pleased to have proved to himself and to the “damned butler,” who had caught him napping in the library, that he was still a young man in himself, with senses and taste unimpaired. But his hand was at the small of his back as he returned to the library.
He was not at all sure about Jack—did not know whether to expect him or not. Jack did not always do what one might have expected him to do under given circumstances. And Sir John rather liked him for it. Perhaps it was that small taint of heredity which is in blood, and makes it thicker than water.
“Nothing like blood, sir,” he was in the habit of saying, “in horses, dogs, and men.” And thereafter he usually threw back his shoulders.
The good blood that ran in his veins was astir to-night. The incidents of the day had aroused him from the peacefulness that lies under a weight of years (we have to lift the years one by one and lay them aside before we find it), and Sir John Meredith would have sat very upright in his chair were it not for that carping pain in his back.
He waited for an hour with his eyes almost continually on the clock, but Jack never came. Then he rang the bell.
“Coffee,” he said. “I like punctuality, if you please.”
“Thought Mr. Meredith might be expected, sir,” murmured the butler humbly.
Sir John was reading the evening paper, or appearing to read it, although he had not his glasses.
“Oblige me by refraining from thought,” he said urbanely.
So the coffee was brought, and Sir John consumed it in silent majesty. While he was pouring out his second cup—of a diminutive size—the bell rang. He set down the silver coffee-pot with a clatter, as if his nerves were not quite so good as they used to be. It was not Jack, but a note from him.
“MY DEAR FATHER,—Circumstances have necessitated the breaking off of my engagement at the last moment. To-morrow's ceremony will not take place. As the above-named circumstances were partly under your control, I need hardly offer an explanation. I leave town and probably England to-night.—I am, your affectionate son,