At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed
herself of a groom, who came forward tentatively, touching his hat.
“Miss Macroyd?” she suggested.
“Yes, miss,” the man said, and led the way round the station to the
victoria which, when Miss Macroyd’s maid had mounted to the place beside
her, had no room; for any one else.
Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite
justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with a young man whom she
might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with;
and after one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that
he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. Westangle’s, but to have been
left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were
reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat
recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial
epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of
the carryall.
Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waiting-room, where he had
left his suit-case. He found the stranger there in parley with the young
woman in the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle’s. It
proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but
the only present hope of any other, and in the hard case he could not
hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to
drive off and leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar
flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides, and perhaps
above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as
heaven seemed to offer him.
He advanced with the delicacy of the highest-bred hero he could imagine,
and said, “I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s, and I’m afraid I’ve got the
only conveyance--such as it is. If you would let me offer you half
of it? Mr. Verrian,” he added, at the light of acceptance instantly
kindling in her face, which flushed thinly, as with an afterglow of
invalidism.
“Why, thank you; I’m afraid I must, Mr. Merriam,” and Verrian was aware
of being vexed at her failure to catch his name; the name of Verrian
ought to have been unmistakable. “The young lady in the office says
there won’t be another, and I’m expected promptly.” She added, with a
little tremor of the lip, “I don’t understand why Mrs. Westangle--” But
then she stopped.
Verrian interpreted for her: “The sea-horses must have given out at
Seasands. Or probably there’s some mistake,” and he reflected bitterly
upon the selfishness of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for
herself and her maid, not considering that she could not know, and has
no business to ask, whether this girl was going to Mrs. Westangle’s,
too. “Have you a check?” he asked. “I think our driver could find room
for something besides my valise. Or I could have it come--”
“Not at all,” the girl said. “I sent my trunk ahead by express.”
A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in impatiently. “Any
other baggage?”
“No,” Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing
driver. “Our chariot is back here in hiding, Miss--”
“Shirley,” she said, and trailed before him through the door he opened.
He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it,
and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not
the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley
seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and
he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set
his jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his
clean-shaven cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty
to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely enough for himself. Such
distinction as he had was from a sort of intellectual tenseness which
showed rather in the gaunt forms of his face than in the gray eyes,
heavily lashed above and below, and looking serious but dull with their
rank, black brows. He was chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he
made himself of having forced Miss Shirley to give her name; but with
that interesting personality at his side, under the same tattered and
ill-scented Japanese goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all
his self-blame.
“I’m afraid it’s rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley,” he
ventured, with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her
hat. “The driver says it’s five miles round through the marshes.”
“Oh, I shall not mind,” she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and
he did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an
invalid, or at best a convalescent.
“These wintry tree-forms are fine, though,” he found himself obliged
to conclude his apology, rather irrelevantly, as the wheels of the
rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the
succession of jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of the
horse.
“Yes, they are,” Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain
surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. “So much variety of
color; and that burnished look that some of them have.” The trees, far
and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the low December sun.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring
we brag of.”
“It is,” she approved, as with novel conviction. “The landscape is
really beautiful. So nice and flat,” she added.
He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the
carryall to include the nearer roadside stretches, with their low bushes
lifting into remoter trees, “It’s restful in a way that neither the
mountains nor the sea, quite manage.”
“Oh yes,” she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in
what she added: “It’s the kind of thing you’d like to have keep on and
on.” She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes
questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: “I suppose I find it
all the more beautiful because this is my first real look into the world
after six months indoors.”
“Oh!” he said, and there was no doubt a prompting in his tone.
She smiled still. “Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose
it’s my conceit of having been the centre of the universe so lately that
makes me mention it.” And here she laughed a little at herself, showing
a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her
teeth. “But this is divine--this air and this sight.” She put her head
out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and
eyes.
When she leaned back again on the seat she said, “I can’t get enough of
it.”
“But isn’t this old rattletrap rather too rough for you?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. “It’s
quite ideally what invalids in easy circumstances are advised to take
carriage exercise.”
“Yes, it’s certainly carriage exercise,” Verrian admitted in the same
spirit, if it was a drolling spirit. He could not help being amused
by the situation in which they had been brought together, through the
vigorous promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the victoria her own, and
the easy indifference of Mrs. Westangle as to how they should get to
her house. If he had been alone he might have felt the indifference as
a slight, but as it was he felt it rather a favor. If Miss Shirley was
feeling it a slight, she was too secret or too sweet to let it be
known, and he thought that was nice of her. Still, he believed he might
recognize the fact without deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he
added, with no apparent relevance, “If Mrs. Westangle was not looking
for us on this train, she will find that it is the unexpected which
happens.”
“We are certainly going to happen,” the girl said, with an acceptance of
the plural which deepened the intimacy of the situation, and which was
not displeasing to Verrian when she added, “If our friend’s vehicle
holds out.” Then she turned her face full upon him, with what affected
him as austere resolution, in continuing, “But I can’t let you suppose
that you’re conveying a society person, or something of that sort, to
Mrs. Westangle’s.” His own face expressed his mystification, and she
concluded, “I’m simply going there to begin my work.”
He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the riddle. “You women are
wonderful, nowadays, for the work you do.”
“Oh, but,” she protested, nervously, anxiously, “it isn’t good work that
I’m going to do--I understand what you mean--it’s work for a living.
I’ve no business to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed to
be a question of arriving or not at the time when I was due.”