Men serve women kneeling; when they get on their feet they go
away.
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.