STRANGE found the preliminaries of his induction into the _rôle_ of an
English Squire even more unpleasant than he had expected.
During the period when he had read Roman law and knocked about the
Courts with the hope of supplementing his income by the experience he
picked up there, the technicalities of the law had bored him to
excruciation point. Now, when they were brought specially to bear on him
he found them more galling still, but being a wise man in his way, he
shirked none of them, and took good care not to take a solitary step in
the dark, till, by the time they had got him off their hands, the
solicitors of the Stranges were in a position to congratulate themselves
at last, on the fact of having found a whole man in the family.
He had gone the rounds of his duties doggedly and had found them
insufferably dull, he had been down to Strange Hall, had left things
there in trim, and had now flown back to London.
One afternoon in June he was standing in the shadow of a deep window, in
one of his rooms in Piccadilly, lazily sharpening a pencil.
He had plenty of work to do, but somehow he had no stomach for it, the
change in his life had got into his bones, and had filled him with
unrest and a certain loss of faith in himself. When at last after a long
meditation, the truth of this broke upon him, it came with an audible
and ample, “Damn!”
“I may as well give it up and amuse myself in a mild way,” he thought,
after a hasty review of matters, “nothing can be too weak and vapid for
my present condition—I feel flabby.”
A mild grunt at his back made him swing round. It was Tolly, just back
from the dentist, of a deeper puce than usual, and with a terrible
uncompromising row of glistening teeth shooting out aggressively between
his thin lips.
He gave a deferential duck, and stood on approval, with a laboured
attempt at an appearance of modest deprecation.
“Turn round, Tolly,” said his master, “away from me, I can’t bear it all
at once!”
He was shaking with silent laughter.
“How do you feel about them yourself, Tolly?”
“Fust-rate, sir—your wussup.”
Since his master’s rise in life he was much exercised as to the best
terms by which to give him honour, and he varied them daily.
“I can bite nails, your wussup.”
“Ah! You mustn’t play fast and loose with these tusks as you might with
ones bred and reared on the premises.”
“Lord! your wussup, I wouldn’t make that free, being, as they are your
property, sir, besides, any fool can see as how they be the real bought
article, money down, not your everyday common grinders. There weren’t a
toff I met as didn’t mention ’em, I tried to keep ’em dark, sir.”
“I shall expect a good deal more from you,” said Strange, pointing the
moral, “now you’re complete. If anyone calls to-day say I’m out and I
won’t be home till night, and—take these to the post before I start,” he
pointed to a big heap of notes on the table, “and don’t drop any of
them, nor swallow your teeth.
“Twenty invitations in a week,” reflected Tolly’s master, “the
first-fruits of my rise in life! they used to average six a week. I’ll
go and see Lady Mary. Damn it all, why need a man lie to himself, I’ll
go and see Miss Waring!”
And he went, and somehow the next day he went again, and the next, and
the next after that. Then he and Gwen discovered a mutual passion for
riding, not up and down the Row, that seemed as tame a pastime to the
one as to the other, but in the early mornings out on the heath at
Hampstead, or sometimes far out on the Surrey side.
Once they went as far as Surbiton, where they got drenched in a shower
and had to take refuge and have tea in an old inn.
But it is not at all to be supposed that with all this intimacy those
two got an inch nearer one another, they were intellectual companions,
nothing more, not even to be called comrades.
Gwen neither evaded nor shirked conventions, she simply swept them
aside, as she did her lovers. As for Strange, he felt her and the rides
very distinctly a boon. She was an excellent flint to make sparks with,
her ways of thought were so new, let alone startling, her modes of
expression so quaint, her tongue so remarkably sharp, and she had such a
brutal habit of speaking undiluted truths. For the once the two agreed,
they disagreed at least three times, and a good pitched battle had to be
fought to settle any question. The sponge was never by any chance thrown
up, it was forced out of the hand of one or of the other of them. It was
a most bracing and delightful experience for Gwen, it was so
satisfactory and so absolutely free from mawkishness, and she reflected,
with superb self-congratulation, that the man had just as little
capacity for that phase as herself.
“She’s hard—hard as nails,” he reflected after an evening at Lady
Mary’s, “and yet, she wasn’t made like that, I could swear. I wonder
what the devil’s wrong with her eyes, and what’ll put them right? I
believe, upon my word I do, that a baby might do the business for her.
There’s not a man living that would have any effect upon them, and yet
there are fellows going who would take that dewiness, for softness, hang
it! it’s mere moisture, but—ah, well, the effect is magnificent!”
He took out his watch, but his hand shook so that he could not open it.
“God forgive me!” he muttered, “this is awful! I have had a good deal in
the way of education at women’s hands, but this is a new experience,” he
remarked after a pause, grinning, and flicking a spot of ash off his
coat, “her want of self-consciousness is next to ghastly, it has an
uncanny sexless sort of air about it that gives one the shivers.”
The intellectual companionship continued unabated for ten more days,
then one evening at the end of June, Gwen Waring told Strange that she
and Lady Mary were going down into the country early in July.
When he got home that night he had a difficulty in mounting the stairs.
When he succeeded, he got himself to the glass, and found he was white
to the lips. He had had a shock—he had discovered, as he had turned out
of Lady Mary’s softly-lighted hall into the street, that he loved the
girl irretrievably, and with the knowledge came fear.
For a few minutes he leaned against the mantel-piece, his head sunk into
his hands, then he raised himself with a sigh, threw off his light
overcoat, and sat down to smoke, but he couldn’t draw a puff, then it
struck him that he was numb with cold.
He looked at the grate with a purpose to make a fire lighting in his
eyes, but with a shrug he shirked the trouble. He could not go to bed,
that was out of the question; as for sitting there freezing, that was
just as impossible. He must move, he must feel the life stir in him
again. He stood up and shook himself, then a thought struck him, he
hurried to his room, changed his clothes, and went out round the corner
to the mews where he kept the horses he had brought up from Strange
Hall.
He found the gear, saddled the freshest, and rode away through short
cuts and byways, away from the noise and hurly-burly, out into the quiet
of the country. Then he drew rein, pulled the mare aside on to a green
strip flanking the road, and let her go her own pace. For a long time he
gave her grace and smoked savagely.
“It is about the most killing blow that could have fallen on a man. It
would be bad for any fellow; but for me, who can love if I can do
anything, to have to pour it all out at the feet of a girl who couldn’t
understand what love, much less passion, means, to save her life! It’s a
beastly backhanded stroke of fate, and I don’t know that I’ve ever done
anything bad enough to deserve it. Lord, how the mare’s sides smoke! I
must have ridden like a maniac. The worst of it is, this isn’t a thing
one can clear off and forget—with the woman right in one’s soul!—the
fine, grand, proud creature! God! it’s almost sacrilege to expect her to
love, with love in the beastly state it is—to love any man-Jack of us;
it’s honour enough to love her and yet,—yet,—when a man has once done
it, done it once and for ever, the only thing in life seems to be to get
something in return. What commercial brutes we are even in this holiest
connection of all! But let her love or not, I’ll give her my love if
she’ll take it and I shall pick up crumbs like old Lazarus.—Pah, how she
dominates one!—Ah, and when _her_ love wakes up—but, the devil! suppose
another fellow is the instrument chosen! Ah!—ah! hold up, mare, are you
stumbling or am I reeling? It’s myself, by Jove, God help us!”
Involuntarily he drove his spurs into the beast, she started forward
angrily, unused to maniacs. Presently he came to his senses and pulled
her up with a drag on her mouth that she did not forget for some time.
She went sulky and stumbled for the next mile, small blame to her! A
Christian would have done more.
Gradually her master’s face cleared itself and softened.
“Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps no other fellow after all, but—who
knows?—a baby’s tender little mouth may do it.”