“He saved Gerard’s life? What nonsense! If he had, I should have heard
about it.”
Irene spoke warmly. The person she addressed was Harroway, an elderly
solicitor, an intimate friend of Hugh and the Merriams. His wife Selina,
who had brought him to pay an afternoon call on Irene, watched with
amused serenity the discomfiture on his broad and benevolent face.
“It isn’t nonsense,” he protested. “I’m not in the habit of talking
nonsense, I assure you. Am I, Selina?”
“A wife’s testimony isn’t evidence,” replied Mrs. Harroway.
“But what do you mean?” asked Irene, growing serious.
“Literally what I said. Have you never heard?”
“No.”
“It was in Switzerland, years ago. Chevasse, who was on the trip with
them, told me. The two were roped together, suddenly fell and dangled
over a precipice, Colman lowest. The guide on top couldn’t hold them up.
The rope was slipping. So Colman whipped out his knife and cut himself
off.”
“And then?”
“Oh, then the guide hauled Gerard up safe and sound.”
“But Hugh?”
“When they looked over to identify the spot where his pulp was lying,
they saw him half way down, miraculously caught on a jag of rock. You
might try the game twenty million times without it succeeding. I’ve had
the place pointed out to me. And there he remained some hours clinging
on between heaven and earth.”
Irene closed her eyes with a shiver.
“Don’t,” she said. “You make me sick.”
“Funny that Gerard never told you of it, for a clearer case of saving
life at the obvious sacrifice of one’s own, I have never heard of.”
Irene’s hand trembled a little as she poured out the tea. Mrs.
Harroway, unobserved, shook her head reproachfully at her husband, who,
interpreting her action rightly, plunged into irrelevant observations.
But at that moment Gerard entered the room. Irene turned to him at once
impulsively.
“Oh, Gerard, Mr. Harroway has been telling me a horrible story of Hugh
saving your life in Switzerland. Is it true?”
A shade of annoyance passed over his face.
“Yes,” he replied. “I remember his doing something of the kind.”
“Oh, do let us talk of something cheerful,” said Mrs. Harroway; and she
led the conversation to ordinary topics until the end of the visit.
When the Harroways had gone, Irene sat on the arm of Gerard’s chair.
“Why did you never tell me?”
He grew red, fidgeted awhile with his hands. At last, looking up, and
seeing her luminous eyes fixed upon him, he said, gravely:
“There are certain things that a man keeps in his own heart.”
The solemnity of the saying somewhat awed her. “And Hugh never spoke
either.”
“Of course not,” said Gerard.
“What an unpayable debt we owe him.”
“We’ll pay it all right when the time comes.”
“What little things women are when compared with men,” said Irene. “We
could never have kept a fact like that locked up in our souls.”
Gerard accepted the tribute with his usual reserve. As his wife knew, he
was not a man to waste words over sentiment. She uttered what she felt
were his thoughts.
“I didn’t understand your not telling me. But now I do. Those things,
when unspoken of, knit two men more firmly together.”
She was silent for a moment; then changing her tone and grasping
Gerard’s arm:
“We won’t speak of it again, either,” she said. “It is horrible to think
of. And what should I have done without you?”
The servant entering to remove the tea things was a signal for Irene to
dress for dinner. She left the room, and then Gerard rose, and,
walking to the window, took out his pocket handkerchief and wiped the
perspiration from his forehead.
The result of her knowledge of this fact in the lives of Hugh and Gerard
was an added tenderness of gratitude in her feelings towards the former.
During the past few months he had been slipping somewhat apart from her.
He had lost his old buoyancy of manner, and it was easy for her feminine
intuition to perceive that the change had some radical cause. Now she
blamed herself for not having taken the initiative, and offered him more
openly the aid of her friendship. The chance of doing so occurred on the
following Sunday, when, in response to an urgent little note, Hugh came
to lunch. Gerard was absent. Business had summoned him to Edinburgh,
where he was likely to remain some time. The two sat down to table
alone together, and, while the servant was in the room, talked of divers
matters: the waif who had been admitted into St. Katherine’s school,
the Institution which was flourishing, and extending its sphere of
benevolence. At last she touched upon literary matters.
“When are we to see a new volume?”
He lifted his shoulders slightly, and fingered the stem of his old
German wine glass.
“When I have regained my lost youth,” he said, ironically. “One must
have enthusiasm even for that kind of rubbish. Don’t look so concerned,”
he added, with a laugh; “I’m not hypochondriac yet. My view of life is
only growing a little more materialistic, that is all. I share Peter
Bell’s conception of the primrose.”
He quoted the lines jestingly, and, the meal being over, drew out his
cigarette case and began to smoke.
“You are talking for the sake of talking,” said Irene. “I wish you
wouldn’t. Hugh,” she continued, with a certain shy softness that had its
charm, “don’t be vexed with me. Tell me what is changing you. You know
that I owe to you the existence of all that is dearest to me in
the world, and I long so to pay you back a little in the help that
friendship can give.”
“You can’t do it now, Renie,” he said, abruptly. “Afterwards you may.
That is, if you and Gerard don’t think me a pitiful scamp. You won’t
have long to wait.”
The sudden realisation that this was perhaps the last of the brotherly
meals he should have with her, dismayed him. In a few days he would be
either the acknowledged betrothed or the acknowledged husband of another
woman--her bitterest enemy. The old dear order had changed. Hitherto
he had held a unique and delicate position in her thoughts, that of
the loyal friend and honourable lover. Henceforward he would be another
woman’s husband, which would make an immeasurable difference. He
looked round the familiar walls of the cosy dining-room, and then with
unconscious wistfulness upon her face in profile. To him there was
none more beautiful in all the world. The broad forehead; the delicate,
sensitive nose; the strong, pointed chin; the mobile, faintly coloured
lips; the eyes capable of great passion, yet showing habitually a grave
and luminous kindness; the noble up sweep of her hair from the temple
contours, giving an impression of queenliness; the soft, fair gold of
her hair itself, crowning her head too lightly to be a crown and too
individually to be a halo; the head poised with tender dignity upon a
broad, full throat--all the conflicting features combined harmoniously
together to form in a lover’s eyes a face telling of a great and tender
womanhood. And the picture of that other rose before him, beautiful,
too, in its sensuous duskiness, yet stamped forever with his own
condemnation of commonness. His glance grew troubled as it met Irene’s.
“There is nothing in the wide world that we would not do for you, Hugh,”
she said.
“Doing is one thing,” he replied. “Letting things go on is another, I’m
afraid you’ll come to look upon me as a blackguard, and that must make
some difference.”
“Nothing will make any difference in our love for you. So long as Gerard
and I sit opposite here, there will be your place always between us.
Besides, the idea of your being a blackguard is simply silly!”
He laughed in spite of his depression. Her tone was emphatic.
“I believe you’d champion me through a grand jury list of iniquities.
I wish you could have split yourself into two in the years past, Renie.
You would have kept me out of mischief.”
It was Irene’s turn to look troubled.
“Do you know, Hugh,” she said in a low voice, “that lately I have feared
I may have spoiled your life.”
“Ah, my dear child,” he cried, regaining in a flash all his old
vehemence, “it is not the missing of the angel’s touch that spoils a
man’s life. He is singularly fortunate to come within the beat of her
wings.”
“Thank you,” she said, blushing very prettily. “That is like your old,
extravagant self.”
For a long time afterwards the colour remained in her face. Thousands of
women have been called angels, and have thought little of it. But not
one has felt otherwise than tremulously abashed when the similitude has
come from a man’s worshipping sincerity.
But that was the end of the conversation. Irene had said her say, and no
more was to be gained by dwelling on the topic.
When he had gone, she settled down to her correspondence. But for a long
while she sat biting the end of her quill pen.
“I wonder who she can be,” she said, musingly. Of course it was a woman.
She passed in review all their common acquaintance; then shook her head
with a smile. This disturbing element in Hugh’s life lay outside the
circle. The image of Minna Hart never presented itself before her
thoughts. For Irene had large ideas, and pictured the woman as one of
commanding intelligence and brilliant personality. How else to account
for the folly of so vigorous a manhood as Hugh’s? A noble man, a noble
choice. Foolish--but sublimely so. She knew little of the ways of men,
judged them according to her own ideals. For her life had been spent
singularly apart from men. Her mother, a delicate woman, unable to bear
the Indian climate, had brought her up in quiet seclusion. She had been
a choice spirit, a weaver of dreams, one whose presence is felt like the
moonlight through Gothic tracery, a writer of flower-like fairy tales
for children, an ethereal being whom it was Irene’s impassioned mission
to shelter from the rough winds. Her father, once a soldier with a V. C.
in the Mutiny, afterwards a commissioner of a great Indian province, had
appeared to her in brief spells of leave, invested with a halo of glory.
On her mother’s death, she had gone out heartbroken to join him, but
only to learn, on arrival at Bombay, that she was fatherless. And then,
for the first time, men, Gerard and Hugh, had come into her life--and
she saw them as gods walking. The years had mellowed into a strong,
homogeneous character her inherited qualities--the mother’s delicate
womanliness, the father’s daring and power of leadership--and busy
contact with the world had developed the acuteness of her judgment; but
the ideals of the girl survived, unprofaned by vulgar touch. The two men
to whom she had given her love and friendship still remained as gods,
above the baser passions and meaner follies of mankind.
Suddenly a face flashed before her, as that, possibly, of the mysterious
woman who was involved in Hugh’s life. She had never seen it in the
flesh; only a photograph of it some years ago, in Hugh’s rooms, when she
was lunching there with Gerard. She had taken a book from the shelves
and the portrait had fallen out. It represented a woman, tall,
resplendent, haughty, cruelly beautiful. The eyes, even in the
photograph, glittered coldly and dangerously. Irene had uttered a little
cry of surprise and admiration. Hugh had taken it from her hands.
“A great beauty,” she had remarked.
“Yes. _La Belle Dame sans merci_.”
“Her eyes are cruel.”
“They are ophidian. I don’t like you to look at them,” he had replied,
throwing the photograph into a drawer. And then he had said, with a
smile: “They belong to ‘old unhappy far-off things, and battles long
ago.’”
Did they? That was the question she now put to herself, and vainly
tried to answer. It is permitted even to the most confiding of women to
entertain occasional doubts as to the ingenuousness of bachelor friends.
At last she drew a sheet of note-paper from the stationery case in front
of her and inscribed the date. But she paused, and gazed absently at the
wall, her mind full of Hugh’s dilemma. She felt an unaccountable dislike
for the woman with the ophidian eyes. Presently she broke into a little
laugh.
“I do believe I am jealous! I must tell Gerard.”