THE FIRST HANDSHAKE
This morning I was just finishing dressing when I heard a blackbird’s
whistle, two or three times repeated, just outside my window.
It interrupted my meditations on a rather interesting subject.
Namely: What was my employer going to say to me to-day about that episode
last night?
How—in what spirit, in what words, would he make his apology?
Of course I know that for the offence of having kissed a girl who is
nothing to him there _is_ no apology a man can make. The mere suggestion
of apologizing for that is adding insult to injury. The only possible
excuse is to say: “_I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I couldn’t help
myself_”—allowing an unspoken—“_and I’d do it again if I had the chance_”
to be interpreted by the tone in which it was spoken.
However, _that_ was quite out of the question here, seeing that there
had been no kiss of that sort in the affair. The offence, however, was
just as inexcusable; more so. To have kissed me on the hair—why, even as
I took up my brushes before the glass this morning I saw the reflection
of another angry wave of scarlet in my face brought there by the memory
which can’t be just brushed away.
It might not have been so infuriating if it hadn’t been the first time....
For I’d never before allowed any man to attempt such a thing. I’ve always
known that one ought to stick to what Lady Mary Wortley-Montague says in
that little poem:
“He _comes too near_ who _comes to be denied_!”
I remembered that last night, as I lay awake; remembered quoting it to
Cicely Harradine. She had laughed and turned rather pink—this was after
some dance we’d both been to at the Slade—and had said, “Yes, Tots dear;
that is so sweet—and so awfully true, of course; only—it _was_ in the
eighteenth century, dear, wasn’t it? and isn’t it _rather_ what you call
‘a Counsel of Perfection?’”
It oughtn’t to be so—it needn’t have been so for me, but now—that’s all
been spoilt—and by _him_!
What can he say about it?
“Nothing else for it—my uncle’s doing.”—Yes, but I’ve got all my answers
for _that_ excuse.
“I was goaded into it by having had such an awful evening; felt I must
do something outrageous.” Yes, but not _that_! I had had an awful evening
too! And _I_ hadn’t wanted to kiss anybody!
“Hadn’t time to think of anything else.”
Nonsense! A business man with his wits sharpened by daily interviews with
other sharp-witted people for whose benefit he has to think out, even
while he’s speaking, excuses, schemes, promises, goodness knows what! Oh,
he’d have to say something more convincing than that to me!
Again I heard the whistle—a monotonous note for a blackbird’s! Then came
a sharp tap at my opened, latticed, wistaria-garlanded casement. A pebble
had been flung up against it.
This gave me quite a little jump; it brought back old days at home; when
Sydney, staying in the house, had wanted to bring me out for a stroll
before breakfast.
“Must be Theo,” I said aloud to myself. But something told me it wasn’t.
I looked out. Yes. There on the gravel beneath, in a blue serge suit that
seemed to make his sleek head shine quite golden in the morning sunshine,
stood my employer, looking up.
Waiting for me to come out? Throwing stones up to catch my attention? Who
taught him that?
“Good morning,” he said quietly. “Will you come down when you are ready?”
I nodded as ungraciously as I could, and drew back at once. I was quite
ready, but I stopped dead-still by the wardrobe glass for a long moment,
letting him wait. Then I turned to the door.
Then I came back again.
I took the shadiest hat I’ve got out of its drawer and pulled it
down firmly over my hair, stabbing it on with my swastika hatpin, my
hand-wrought silver one that Sydney designed for me, my two mounted
regimental buttons of father’s, and my little pearl-headed one. I daresay
my head did look all bristling with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty’s.
But if I’d had more pins I’d have stuck them _all_ in! And even if I do,
like Blanche and Theo, usually go about hatless in the gardens, I was
going to use all the “cover” I could to meet the Governor’s apology,
whatever it might be. For _now_ he was going to have his work cut out for
him! And whatever he began to say about last night’s brusque, snatched
kiss, I wasn’t going to help him out by one syllable. I could wait.
Let him explain; floundering about for words, probably, as he hasn’t
floundered yet! Feeling most satisfactorily composed myself, I came down
the stairs. One of the maids, in china-blue print, moved aside a dust-pan
for me to pass.
Then I saw something that ruffled me again.
In that dust-pan there was a handful of pink, crystallized rose-leaves
and a couple of tiny silver horseshoes—Theodora’s “confetti!” It must
have dropped out of the draping of my skirt as I rushed upstairs—was
there no getting away from last night?—and I know that there was
something more than well-trained civility in that girl’s smiling “Good
morning, Miss Nancy!”
Why can’t they say “Miss Trant”? Do they consider it isn’t worth while
for so short a time, as they think?—_Hateful_ household!
I had only just unruffled myself again as I faced the Governor in the
sunshine outside.
“Come in here, won’t you?” he said, holding open the little white gate
under the rambler arch of the rose-garden.
It was just then a bouquet of warm, scented colour, shading down from the
deepest damask of the bed of Jeune Amours, through the rosy, straggling
Baroness von Ulks and the faintly-flushed Cuisses des Nymphes to the
dead-white Frau Karl Druschkis—such a rose-garden, such an earthly
paradise for a before-breakfast stroll—_alone_!
Side by side we paced slowly down to the end of the box-bordered path
between the pink Maman Cochets (another echo of last night!) before
another word was said.
Then he began. “I wanted to have this opportunity of saying something to
you.”
His tone was conciliatory, quiet. The expression of his face was—well,
not in the least his mask of office-hours, nor the scowling barricade
he put up at last night’s dinner-table; but guarded and absolutely
non-committal.
So was mine, I hope.
I waited for him to go on.
“I may tell you,” he went on, “that I’ve been regretting—”
Last night, I supposed? A curious way of _putting_ it!
—“regretting for some time that it was you I asked to take on this—this
situation for me.”
“Oh!”
We turned and walked back again.
“I mean,” he added quietly, “that I regret having dragged a girl of your
kind, more sensitive and spirited than I had imagined—”
What _had_ he imagined, then?
—“into this affair.”
“Oh.”
“I—I suppose I ought to have known better than to ask—_you_.”
“Oh,” I said, for the third time, and I meant to stop there. But somehow
I couldn’t help going on rather acidly, “And which of your other
employees do you wish you had asked instead? Miss Robinson?”
(Who would have been provided with material for impersonations of the
family Waters for the rest of her life.)
—“Or Miss Holt?”
(_She_, I know, would have screamed aloud when he inflicted that
extraordinary kiss upon her!)
“Miss Smith, of course, has her affections otherwise engaged——”
“Ah? And so that would have been a barrier, would it? Even to this kind
of an affair?” retorted the Governor, very quickly and looking hard at me.
I knew what he meant. He was thinking of the Major’s clumsy bringing-up,
yesterday, of the name of Sydney Vandeleur.
So I lifted my eyes, which had been idly studying the grey pattern of
shadow flung by a trellised rose-arch upon my creamy skirt, and I looked
the Governor firmly in the face as I said quietly:
“I imagine so.”
Then _he_ said, “Oh.”
And then there was another pause.
Surely Mr. Waters could not break it by anything else, now, than by
coming to the point—saying whatever it was he meant to say about his
behaviour at the door of the den? But nothing of the kind.
“You quite understand, then, that I am sorry—for bringing you into all
this?” he began again. “Right. Now, I suppose I ought to offer to release
you from the arrangement.”
“Yes?” I looked up again quickly, hopefully.
“Only, you see, I can’t,” my employer concluded, slowly. “I can’t do
that. The—er—my—the reason which forced me into it is—still there.”
“Oh.”
Another turn. This time towards the pergola.
“Another thing,” he went on—and this time I really did think I knew what
was coming next. “About last night.”
I didn’t say, “Oh”—I simply waited for whatever apology he thought fit to
make.
“Last night, in the drawing-room before dinner. I’m afraid I was rather
rude.”
“_Before_ dinner?” I echoed, forgetting what could have happened then.
“Yes; when you were asking me about that place in Wales, Porth Cariad,”
he said. “I told you, rather off-handedly, I’m afraid, that there was ‘a
wooden woman’ there.”
“Oh, yes!”
“Well, there is. It’s the figure-head of a ship, some vessel that was
wrecked in the bay, years ago,” explained the Governor quite simply.
“They’ve put it up beyond the two cottages there, on the cliff. I ought
to have explained that at the time.”
Well! And wasn’t there anything else he had to explain? With all
these “Oh’s” and pauses, he was a long, long time in coming to that
unjustifiable kiss—and yet something convinced me that his mind was full
of it even while he mentioned these other things first.
“Besides that,” he went on deliberately, “there’s something I was
thinking over last night, for quite a time before I went to sleep.”
Ah! At last!
“I wanted to suggest——” he was saying, when, from behind the leafy screen
of the pergola there came a booming cry of:
“Aha! Here they are! here they are! Might have known what they were at!
Love among the roses, eh?”
And in another moment there hove into view the rotund, white-waistcoated
form and the rosy John Bull face, smiling under the light grey, dented
felt hat, of Uncle Albert Waters.
Beaming and rubbing his hands, he advanced upon us.
“Now, young people, young people! Breakfast’s ready! Didn’t hear the
gong, eh? No, of course not. Something better to listen to, as I said.
_I_ heard you, Billy! I heard you whistling under her window half an hour
ago! Something worth while being an early bird for now, what? But come
along.”
He slipped one arm into his nephew’s, the other into mine, and wheeled us
round towards the house.
“I told your mother I’d come out myself and fetch you in!”
Perfectly unconscious that if wishes could have killed he must have
fallen down shrivelled to a cinder on the garden path, he rolled on
happily between us towards the French windows of the dining-room,
prattling robustiously all the way.
“Nothing comes up to that nine-o’clock-in-the-morning smell of bacon
and coffee, does it? Smells far better than it tastes, they say! Which
reminds me that I once heard a young lady, Nancy, my dear—only she was
a cynical young person, not nearly so pretty—I heard her say that the
best part of frizzling bacon was like Love—all in the anticipation! Never
tasted as good as it promised to, so to speak! Of course you don’t agree
with her?”
“No, oh, _no_!” I cried hastily, partly because I felt I must disagree
with somebody, partly because I realized that the inevitable effect of
this detestable old man upon his nephew was to strike him dumb when he
ought to have spoken!
“Ah, quite right, quite right!” responded Uncle Albert, with an
affectionate pressure of my arm in his. “_That’s_ the attitude! I don’t
believe in this modern plan of analysing everything down to nothing, do
you?”
“_Hate_ it,” I said viciously—meaning that I hated having my arm squeezed
by horrible relations-in-law never-to-be.
“I see you do! Good! My dear, I’m delighted to find that Billy’s
sweetheart sees eye to eye with Billy’s uncle on so many points. That’s
why I’m taking you out this morning—Oh, yes! you too, my boy! Not going
to separate the turtle-doves!—going to take you both out if you can beg
mother off from church. I’m going to motor you over—not a hundred miles
away, and show you something—Aha! Something that I fancy you will approve
of as much as I do!”
“Heavens! What will this new horror turn out to be?” thought I; catching
the same question in the Governor’s eye as we entered the dining-room,
where the family, including Cariad, was already at breakfast, and sat
down to the coffee and bacon of old Mr. Waters’ disgusting metaphor. We
weren’t long spared the answer to that question.
“Now, Mary! I’ve just been telling our two young people here,” began
Uncle Albert almost at once, “that they’re going over in the car with me
this fine morning to look at something I particularly want them to see.
Now, I’ll give you three guesses what it is—No, I won’t—”
(Interrupting Theo, who had leapt up in her chair with a shriek of
“Wedding presents! That picture!”)
“—I want the pleasure of telling you myself. Picture? No, child.
Something to put the picture in—to _be_ the picture in, ho, ho! It’s a
house to let!”
“A _house_!” murmured Blanche, clasping her hands, and obviously seeing
herself helping to arrange the flowers in it.
“A charming house, only fifteen miles from here. Just the place for Billy
and his Nancy to settle down in when they get married,” enlarged the
elderly _enfant terrible_. “In fact, once they’ve seen it, they’ll want
to motor on and order that special licence at once, I shouldn’t wonder!”
Mercy! I turned my eyes to Mrs. Waters, as if imploring her help to
change the conversation; she only nodded and smiled and murmured: “Pretty
blouse—I always like you in lacy white things, Nancy!”
There was no checking Uncle Albert; on he went:
“I was looking at the place only last week, and it’s still going! There’s
a rose-garden, my dear, almost as prettily arranged as the one here
that you were billing and cooing in just now. And a splendid vegetable
garden for the more practical side of life. South aspect!—Very excellent
fish-curry, Mary—Nice, airy bedrooms! _And_”—his voice took on an
impressive rallentando—“Now, what do you think? A little—a little white
wicket-gate at the top of the stairs! That’s the crowning touch, eh?”
Yes. It was.
“That was what took _my_ fancy, you know! I immediately said to myself——”
At all costs, I felt, must Uncle Albert be kept from repeating what he
had said to himself.
“Yes—But, Mr. Waters,” I interrupted wildly, “I’m so afraid that that
house wouldn’t—couldn’t do for _us_!”
“What, my dear! Why not? If you only see it, you’ll say as I did——”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely,” I burst in; “but the fact of the matter
is that we—we have arranged to live in London”—“and in separate houses
for ever,” I might have added. I went on improvising rapidly. “You see,
we shall have a town house for most of the year, and for the summer we’re
looking round for a sort of—of farmhouse, with two cottages by the sea,
you know! In—in Anglesey, I think. I am so fond of—of that part of the
country, so—Those were our plans, aren’t they?” I concluded, with one
reckless “Say so, _do_!” glance at the Governor.
“Yes—rather! That’s what _we’d_ thought of!” he returned, with a glance
back at me which betrayed something very like pure gratitude.
As well it might!
For again, just before I spoke, my employer had been at such an utter
loss that—for the first time since I’d seen him, I felt positively
_sorry_ for him.
And I answered his glance with the tiniest nod of encouragement.
They were the first friendly signals that had ever passed between us.
* * * * *
“Look here. I must speak to you.”
This was my employer, hurriedly to me after breakfast, in the veranda.
Now, as that deep, shady veranda is built all the way round the house,
as every one of the windows gives on to it, and as all the windows are
always wide open, I couldn’t help giving a look round it as much as to
say, “Here?”
“Not here,” he muttered, still more hurriedly. “This seems to be the
deuce of a house to talk in—never saw such a place. And there’s no time
now. My uncle was going to take us along in the car——”
“_Must_ we go?” I asked, softly and ruefully, with my back to one of the
pillars.
“No. I’ve knocked that on the head—I’m going to take him off by myself to
play golf. I said you’d really rather go to church with my mother and the
girls.”
“Oh, thanks so much,” I said fervently. “I certainly would!”
“So I thought. Well, then, we shall be lunching at the Club House—or,
anyhow, getting lunch somewhere out—not coming back here.”
I nearly said, “Thanks, so much!” once more.
I also nearly smiled to think that anyone else, catching sight of the two
of us talking so quickly, so quietly, and so close together under the
soft mauve fringe of wistaria-blossom that drooped from the glazed roof,
might easily have imagined that our conspiracy was how to spend most of
this glorious Sunday _together_, instead of _apart_!
“We might not even be back for tea,” said the Governor.
“And when is——” I paused and turned my eyes towards the house, “_going_?”
“Six o’clock train back to town this evening,” said the Governor, looking
steadily at me.
A “Thank goodness!” remained unuttered on the tip of my tongue, as I
felt obliged to say, “I hope he didn’t think it odd of me not to want to
see”—I brought it out with a jerk—“that house.”
“Oh, no! He seemed rather bucked, really, to hear that—well, that we
were so far on in our plans. Anglesey, you know, and so on,” said the
Governor, in an expressionless voice as I turned quickly away.
For I’d caught the heralding whiff of a cigar round the corner! Also, I
wanted to be safely in my own room, getting ready for church, just at the
time that those two men would be setting out for the links.
My employer took one step after me.
“This evening, then?—I mean, for what I was going to say to you.”
Ah. That interrupted apology weighed on his mind.
“Very well,” I said. “Good-bye.”
And I drew a breath of relief to think of the whole blessed Day of Rest
before me.
* * * * *
Even Church, however, wasn’t without its slight reminder of the situation.
I was feeling rested, soothed, lulled—and, I am afraid, not strictly
attentive—when my attention was caught, first by Theo’s moist palm being
thrust into mine, much as Cariad thrusts his nose, and then by a phrase
in the voice of the officiating curate:
“_I publish the banns of marriage between_——”
Banns, of course! Of course they must needs publish banns on this
particular Sunday and in this particular church! thought I, rather
pettishly. Well, I supposed it wasn’t really the Governor’s fault! and
that there _are_ banns read every week! The next words I heard were:
“_Also of Leonard Harris, bachelor_—”
Ah! I knew his name; it was the young man from the Waters’ butcher, who,
as I had already been told, was to marry the prettiest of the maids at
The Lawn, the one who was sweeping the stairs this morning.
—“_and Ethel Mary Bell, spinster, both of this parish._”
Both absurdly happy, probably, in a “Smithie” kind of way. I wondered if
“he” were red and greasy, like so many butchers? Whether he’d leave “her”
at home while he went and sat all the evening in the “Spotted Dog”?
My young man—I suppose to some people the Governor _would_ be my “young
man”—isn’t that sort. Not that it need make the slightest difference to
_me_ if he were! I needn’t worry about the sort of husband he’ll make—to
someone else.
“_Also between_——”
What a lot of engaged couples! Six, at least, were “called” to-day.
And I wondered about each of those six engaged girls.... Which of them
had bloomed out into what books call “_this strange new happiness that
had come to her_” on HIS account, and which of them just wanted to be
“engaged” for its own sake?
For supposing an engagement were stripped of all its glamour of
importance? Yes, my dears! Take away the delight of discussing, with
other girls, the possibilities of finest nainsook and torchon. Take away
the chance of growing positively left-handed from showing off “his”
ring. Take away the joy of being, instead of an unattended wallflower at
dances and parties, always more or less of a guarded treasure. Take away
that feeling of being at one and the same time much younger, much older
and much better-looking. Take away the comforting conviction that _now_
you needn’t fret about what’s to become of you when you grow _passée_
and “long in the tooth,” as Major Montresor unkindly calls various
ex-favourites of his own. Take all those “extras” away—and what remains
of your pride and joy in HIM alone? There’s a sum for the “really”
engaged girl. I can’t help feeling I can guess how it would work out
in—say, four cases out of six!
Perhaps I’m wrong.... Perhaps the whole six of them would still go on
feeling that _their_ unparalleled engagement had caused the sun to rise
upon a new heaven and a brand-new earth. But it’s odds, long odds,
against any one of the six having an “affair” in the least like—_mine_.
And the curate went on reading out names.
“_Also_——”
“_Between William Waters, bachelor, of this parish_,” breathed his
younger sister in a gusty whisper, “_and Nancy Monica Trant, spinster_—of
the parish of what, Nancy?”
“S-sh! Theo!” I whispered, still wondering about those banns.... Would
it come to that? Would my employer feel himself obliged, before our
twelve-months’ contract was up, to let those banns be actually published?
“_If any of you know any just cause or impediment why these persons
should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony_,” concluded the curate’s
voice, “_ye are to declare it_.”
What in the world _was_ Mr. Waters going to “declare” about it to his
family when we reached that point? What just cause or impediment (except
the real ones) would he choose to “announce” as the bar to our getting
married? Or would he, just as he did this morning at breakfast, leave
all explanations to _me_, and reward me with a grateful look when I’d
achieved them?
Well!...
Plenty of time before _that_ happens....
* * * * *
To-night, though, there’d be that other explanation: his to me about
that—really, under the circumstances it might be called that _outrage_!
Even yet I hadn’t made up my mind how I was to accept what he should say.
The only thing left standing of all the many answers I’d considered and
rejected was, “Well, it must never happen again, that’s all!”
Even that doesn’t sound right, somehow.
Perhaps something really clinching will occur to me later.
* * * * *
It was almost at the end of this Day of Rest that the Governor, extra
sunburnt and out-of-door-looking from the links, returned to find the
women-folk of his household—to which I suppose I must count myself as
belonging officially—sitting over that diminuendo of half-cups that marks
the end of tea.
“Has your uncle gone, dear?”
“Yes; met some old crony of his and joined him for the journey home. If
you tell me where his bag is I’ll get it sent down to the station to meet
the six, Mother?”
“I’ll see to it now.”
She went out of the drawing-room—I _know_ with the usual gentle intention
of leaving the young people a minute to themselves after having been
apart all day; but before Theodora and Blanche could follow her, the
Governor, saying that he simply must change and get this dust off,
disappeared himself.
He disappeared until supper-time.
For late Sunday supper they don’t dress at The Lawn. So I was still
wearing my cream cloth costume with the white French blouse that Mrs.
Waters likes when the hour came which is given over to my official
_fiancé_ and myself. I’m quite hardened to this now.
I supposed he would suggest the den. (I hate that den.) But he didn’t.
“Shall we go for a walk?” he said instead, “round the lawn?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I fetch you a wrap to put over that frock?”
“Oh, no. It’s perfectly warm, thanks.”
“Oh.... Very well.”
And so, at the dusk of the day, just as in the morning sunshine of it, I
found myself pacing a garden path by his side, and wishing to goodness
he’d get this over, out of the way.
He ought to be made to _grovel_, of course; that was as it should be.
But the longer he delayed mentioning that grotesque incident, the more it
_loomed_!
It seemed to hang over my head like the shade of the trees that bordered
the further edge of the lawn, which we had now reached. The great spread
of turf was gleaming greyly in the dew. A bat, attracted by the whiteness
of my gown, flickered out of the shade and wheeled above us.
“Well,” began the Governor, “my uncle left all sorts of messages for you.”
He would, of course. Carefully refraining from asking what they were, I
said mildly, “Thank you.”
“He’s back in London by now.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose if he’d stayed on much longer,” observed my employer, in a
detached tone, “_you wouldn’t_!”
I said defensively, “I really _had_ been thinking I might find myself
obliged to go back to town at once!”
“After arranging to stay here for at least a fortnight,” he concluded
quietly; “after having given notice at the office—”
“The office” was good! Just as if “the office” meant anything but
himself, Mr. William Waters!
—“and having no people of your own to consider—what should you have said
to mine?”
“I should have had to tell them that it was to—to attend a funeral!”
I retorted, with a memory of Mrs. Skinner. “Or”—here I checked the
suggestion of getting my hair singed and cut. I thought I’d better not
begin by mentioning my hair! And I added recklessly—“or that I’d got to
go to the dentist’s and have every one of my teeth out!”
“Rather than stay here in these circumstances. I see. Yes. I——Do you
know, I have felt uncommonly like that myself,” admitted my employer.
“That’s what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I thought it over
last night, as I told you, and I’ve been thinking about it again to-day.”
I wondered what sort of a game of golf he’d played.
“It can’t go on like this!” he said, suddenly stopping in our stroll and
facing me in the deepening dusk under the copper-beech. “I can’t stand
it. It’s got a—a bit too thick!” he concluded, quite schoolboyishly.
Then he began again, incoherently, indignantly, as if each word he said
were a shell that held showers of bullets of other words.
“Theo’s tomfoolery! Those dashed flowers! My uncle and his—his remarks!”
“I know!” I said fervently. He turned on me again, and added
unexpectedly, “And _you_!”
“M-me?”
“Yes!” explosively. “You’re the worst of all—and you do know it! Because
I’ve let you in like, this—”
“They’ll hear you from the house—you really are like Theo sometimes.”
—“Because I’ve let you in,” sinking his voice and speaking once more
calmly and deliberately, “for lots of unpleasantnesses which nobody could
have—well, which _I_ never anticipated—you do all in your power to pay me
back!”
“All that—at dinner last night,” I said virtuously, “was nothing to do
with me. You can’t say it was.”
“No, I admit it was Theo.... But it was all part and parcel of the same
impossible situation. Impossible! It can’t go on like this.”
“So you said before! But this morning you said you were unable to release
me?”
“So I am. Which means that there’s only one other thing to be done about
it,” said my employer.
I waited, wondering what on earth this might be.
Utterly unexpected was his next remark:
“Don’t you think you could manage to be—_friends_ with me?”
“_Friends?_” I repeated incredulously.
Then something of his meaning began to dawn upon me, and it was with a
return of Manner B that I added: “I suppose you mean ‘official’ friends?”
“No, I don’t,” he said rather tartly. (That manner never has been lost
on him.) “I mean, why can’t we be really friends and call ‘_Pax_’—for at
least the time that you’re here? Don’t you see how much better it would
make it if we could face these awkwardnesses together, instead of my
knowing every time that you are only waiting for the chance to rub it in
and to get at me?”
This was all so foreign to his Near Oriental vocabulary that I nearly
laughed. But not quite. For it was being borne in upon me still more
clearly that I didn’t care for this suggestion of his at all. He was
actually asking for my help and co-operation, not in a sham rôle, but a
_real_ one? Well, I thought, what _cheek_!
“If you mean,” I said, “that you want me to promise not to ‘rag’—not
to—to banter you again about all this; not to go on saying things that
mean one thing for you and another to whoever else hears them, and all
that——”
I was going to say that this I might promise; although I felt he was
asking for a good deal—for his official _fiancée’s_ one safety-valve, in
fact!
“No, no! That’s not what I mean,” he put in. “When I say ‘friends,’ I
mean it. Genuine friends. On the terms we might be on if we weren’t en—if
we hadn’t this ‘engagement’ between us.”
“How _can_ we be that?” said I emphatically.
“Why can’t we?” he persisted.
“Why? Because I—I don’t see how I could be expected to answer such a
question!”
He didn’t _say_, “You agreed to the other!” But I knew some men might. So
I went on trying to explain to this specially obtuse one.
“Don’t you see how much easier it is to pretend to be engaged or even—in
love with a person, than to turn round and _like_ them because you’re
asked to?”
“Is it?”
“But of _course_ it is!” said I. “One _can_ act being—engaged and all
that. One can’t force oneself into friendship, real liking.” (Stupid, he
was; it was just like his not seeing the difference between accepting
furs—and a frock!) “One simply can’t make oneself _like_. That is asking
too much. And I never bargained for it. It wasn’t——”
—“In the arrangement,” I nearly said.
I might just as well have said it! For:
“Damn—dash that infernal arrangement!” muttered my employer heatedly,
crunching, in the absence of Cariad, the well-kept gravel beneath his
heel. “Can’t you forget that, leave that alone for the time being? It
would be so much easier——”
“Yes! For you perhaps!” I retorted. “But not easy for me; and it’s
impossible for me to feel like being ‘friends’ to order!”
He said nothing for a minute. Then he began again quietly. “You mean you
dislike me?”
“I don’t even know you well enough for really liking or disliking,” I
argued coldly. “And besides, what have we—you and I—in common, that we
should expect to get on well together?”
I knew what a hopeless question _that_ is to answer about almost any two
persons!
He said rather helplessly, “Well, but hang it all! What have you in
common with——”
Here I _felt_, suspended between us in the dusk like a Mahomet’s coffin,
the name of Sydney Vandeleur!
But the Governor changed his mind about uttering it.
He _said_:
“For instance, what can you have in common with a man like Montresor?
You’re twenty-one. He’s what?—Fifty? Sixty? Yet you can talk—you can——You
seem to get on all right with him.”
“Naturally!” I said.
The Governor said nothing.
He put up a hand and leaned against a bough of the copper-beech under
which we were standing.
Well! It seemed going to be a long discussion.
I sat down on the garden bench a step or so away, and turned my head to
look at the glimmering white trumpets of a tobacco-plant that grew behind
the bench. The only form in which tobacco smells anything but poisonous!
And there were such beds of it at home ... in the evening it scented all
the grounds....
“Major Montresor, as he told you, knew me in my home, knew all my
people,” I went on slowly. “He knew all the places I went to before I had
to drop out of everything that I cared for and had to slave for my own
living in that detestable City of yours.”
“You speak as if _I_ owned the City—as if I were responsible for your
having had to work there—for the whole thing! Is that fair? Must you go
on making me stand for all that? Supposing it hadn’t been there at all
that you first met me, Nancy?”
For the first time the name slipped out from my official _fiancé_ quite
naturally.
“Don’t you think,” he went on, “that we might have managed to get on
moderately well then?”
“How can I tell?” said I. I _wanted_ to keep him on that strictly
business footing. This other I didn’t want. I knew it would take
something from me, and give me nothing—nothing to stand up for myself
with—in its place.
“Try to imagine,” he persisted, “that I’d known you in your home, like
that chap—what’s-his-name—”
The name—Vandeleur—flickered between us once more like that bat in the
air!
—“like Montresor. Imagine that you’d never been at the Near
Oriental—never heard of the place. I’m sure I often wish _I_ hadn’t,” the
Governor’s voice came ruefully out of the dusk. “Then, instead of this
eternal sparring—”
“My only refuge,” I thought, “and he’s trying to turn me out of it!”
—“there might surely have been something distinctly resembling friendship
between us?” he said.
I said obstinately, “Might there? I don’t know.”
He moved. There wasn’t enough light to see his face. Only his collar made
a white blur against the branch, and the broad slope of his shoulders
showed dark against the sky that had deepened from lilac to purple.
“But I know,” he said quietly, “that you could—that you _could_ be——”
He paused.
“Well?” I said, rather uncomfortably. “I could be what?”
“Rather a little brick to me if you chose,” said the Governor.
I am sure it slipped out without his meaning it to. _He_ would have been
ready to go on arguing quite logically about “how much more sensible” et
cetera.... How there was “absolutely no valid reason why it shouldn’t”
and so forth ... for another hour!
_He_ can’t know how the key of a logical argument will fumble forever at
the locked safe-door of a woman’s mind that could just fly open to the
cipher spelt “Appreciation.”
—“Rather a little brick.”
So he did think me capable of that?
I was glad of the dark under the copper-beech. For I didn’t want my
employer to see that his words had any sort of effect on me. Four words
ought not, certainly, to be enough to threaten to bring one’s flag down
with a run ... or even to flush one’s cheeks with that sudden warmth—of
surprise. I didn’t mean to hesitate——
But there was a moment’s silence before I could think what to say. I was
glad he was standing right away from me....
Just at that, he came and sat down beside me on the garden-seat.
“Well?” he said expectantly.
“M-m—very well,” I heard myself say with a little sigh.
“You mean that you will?”—quickly. “That it’s peace between us?”
“Yes—” reluctantly, from me.
“And that, instead of remaining”—I heard him laugh a little—“a mere
_fiancée_, you’ll be friends now—real chums?”
“If you like,” I sighed again. “That _is_ promotion, isn’t it?” I said,
not meaning to be altogether too polite to him.
“Nancy, I know I’m rotten in lots of ways,” he admitted frankly. “I
daresay you think I’ve got a beast of a temper, don’t you?”
“Well,” I said slowly, “you did kick Cariad, didn’t you?”
“Little brute needs it! He’s disgustingly spoilt. Everyone is who belongs
to my mother.” ...
“And you did make Theo cry!”
“Did her good!”
“It didn’t in the least! She was just as bad again to-day!”
“Was she, by Jove? Then I shall have to——”
“No, no, she wasn’t. I mean, _you_ are!”
“Ah, but I’m—_we’re_ going to turn over a new leaf!” he said, laughing.
“That’s settled, isn’t it? Good! This is going to be no end better, all
round.”
All very well for _him_ to say so! I thought, as I got up and turned
towards the dim, blue-white front of the house with the dark girdle of
the veranda circling it, and the windows, now lighted up, set into it
like a chain of long, rosy jewels.
He rose too.
“Well!” he said, straightening himself a head and shoulders above me. “Do
we shake hands on that, Nancy?”
“I suppose so,” said I.
What else was there to say or do?
_I_ don’t consider it’s going to be “better all round.” For me it will
be ever so much more awkward—as well as something—yes!—something like a
_climb-down_.
Still——
As he held out his hand I put my own into a particularly warm and hearty
grip.
It was the very first time we’d shaken hands at all.
Last night a kiss on the hair!
To-night, a handshake!...
And, in spite of all I’d expected, he’d never once mentioned that kiss.
I suppose he won’t now.