THE HERMIT'S SHELL
Sara paused with the sugar-tongs poised above the Queen Anne bowl.
“Sugar?” she queried.
Trent regarded her seriously.
“One lump, please.”
She handed him his cup and poured out another for herself. Then she said
lightly:
“I heard you order your car. Is this quite a suitable afternoon for
joy-riding?”
“More so than for walking,” he retaliated. “I'm going to drive you
home.”
“At six o'clock?”
“At six o'clock.”
“And suppose I wish to leave before then?”
He cast an expressive glance towards the windows, where the rain could
be heard beating relentlessly against the panes.
“It's quite up to you . . . to walk home.”
Sara made a small grimace of disgust.
“Otherwise,” she said tentatively, “I am going to stay here, whether I
will or no?”
He nodded.
“Yes. It's my birthday, and I'm proposing to make myself a present of an
hour or two of your society,” he replied composedly.
Sara regarded him with curiosity. He had been openly displeased to find
her trespassing on his estate--which was only what current report
would have led her to expect--yet now he was evincing a desire for her
company, and, in addition, a very determined intention to secure it. The
man was an enigma!
“I'm surprised,” she said lightly. “I gathered from a recent remark of
yours that you didn't think too highly of women.”
“I don't,” he replied with uncompromising directness.
“Then why--why----”
“Perhaps I have a fancy to drop back for a brief space into the life I
have renounced,” he suggested mockingly.
“Then you really are what they call you--a hermit?”
“I really am.”
“And feminine society is taboo?”
“Entirely--as a rule.” If, for an instant, the faintest of smiles
modified the grim closing of his lips, Sara failed to notice it.
The cold detachment of his answer irritated her. It was as though
he intended to remain, hermit-like, within his shell, and she had a
suspicion that behind this barricade he was laughing at her for her
ineffectual attempts to dig him out of it with a pin.
“I suppose some woman didn't fall into your arms just when you wanted
her to?” she hazarded.
She had not calculated the result of this thrust. His eyes blazed for
a moment. Then, a shade of contempt blending with the former cool
insouciance of his tone, he said quietly:
“You don't expect an answer to that question, do you?”
The snub was unmistakable, and Sara's cheeks burned. She felt heartily
ashamed of herself, and yet, incongruously, she was half inclined to
lay the blame for her impertinent speech on his shoulders. He had almost
challenged her to deal a blow that should crack that impervious shell of
his.
She glanced across at him beneath her lashes, and in an instant all
thought of personal dignity was wiped out by the look of profound pain
that she surprised in his face. Her shrewd question, uttered almost
unthinkingly in the cut-and-thrust of repartee, had got home somewhere
on an old wound.
“Oh, I'm sorry!” she exclaimed contritely.
She could only assume that he had not heard her low-voiced apology, for,
when he turned to her again, he addressed her exactly as though she had
not spoken.
“Try some of these little hot cakes,” he said, tendering a plateful.
“They are quite one of Mrs. Judson's specialties.”
With amazing swiftness he had reassumed his mask. The bright, hazel eyes
were entirely free from any hint of pain, and his voice held nothing
more than conventional politeness. Sara meekly accepted one of the cakes
in question, and for a little while the conversation ran on stereotyped
lines.
Presently, when tea was over, he offered her a cigarette.
“I have not forgotten your tastes, you see,” he said, smiling.
“I do smoke,” she admitted. “But”--the confession came with a rush, and
she did not quite know what impelled her to make it--“I smoked--that day
in the train--out of sheer defiance.”
“I was sure of it,” he responded in amused tones. “But now”--striking
a match and holding it for her to light her cigarette--“you will smoke
because you really like it, and because it would be a friendly action
and condone the fact that you are being held a prisoner against your
will.”
Sara smiled.
“It is a very charming prison,” she said, contemplating the harmony of
the room with satisfied eyes.
“You like it?” he asked eagerly.
She looked at him in surprise. What could it matter to him whether she
liked it or not?
“Why, of course, I like it,” she replied. “Who wouldn't? You see,” she
added a little wistfully, “I have no home of my own now, so I have to
enjoy other people's.”
“I have no home, either,” he said shortly.
“But--but this----”
“Is the house in which I live. One wants more than a few sticks of
furniture to make a home.”
Sara was struck by the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man,
with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted
hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate
outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx.
She hastily steered the conversation towards a less dangerous channel,
and gradually they drifted into the discussion of art and music;
and Sara, not without some inward trepidation--remembering Molly's
experience--touched on his own musicianship.
“It was surely you I herd?” she queried a trifle hesitatingly. “You
were playing some Russian music that I knew. Your man ordered me off the
premises”--smiling a little--“so I didn't hear as much as I should have
liked.”
“Is that a hint?” he asked whimsically.
“A broad one. Please take it.”
He hesitated a moment. Then--
“Very well,” he said abruptly.
He rose and led the way into an adjoining room.
Like the hall they had just quitted, it was pleasantly illumined by
candles in silver sconces, and had evidently been arranged to serve
exclusively as a music-room, for it contained practically no furniture
beyond a couple of chairs, and a beautiful mahogany cabinet, of which
the doors stood open, revealing sliding shelves crammed full of musical
scores.
A grand piano was so placed that the light from either window or candles
would fall comfortably upon the music-desk; and on a stool beside it
rested a violin case.
Trent opened the case, and, lifting the violin from is cushiony bed of
padded satin, fingered it caressingly.
“Can you read accompaniments?” he asked, flashing the question at her
with his usual abruptness.
“Yes.” Sara's answer came simply, minus the mock-modest tag: “A little,”
or “I'll do my best,” which most people seem to think it incumbent on
them to add, in the circumstances.
It is one of the mysteries of convention why, when you are perfectly
aware that you can do a thing, and do it well, you are expected to
depreciate your capability under penalty of being accounted overburdened
with conceit should you fail to do so.
“Good.” Trent pulled out an armful of music from the cabinet and looked
through it rapidly.
“We'll have some of these.” (“These” being several suites for violin and
piano.)
Sara's lips twitched. He was testing her rather highly, since the
pianoforte score of the suites in question was by no means easy. But,
thanks to the wisdom of Patrick Lovell, who had seen to it that she
studied under one of the finest masters of the day, she was not
a musician by temperament alone, but had also a surprisingly good
technique.
At the close of the second suite, Trent turned to her enthusiastically,
his face aglow. For the moment he was no longer the hermit, aloof
and enigmatical, but an eager comrade, spontaneously appealing to a
congenial spirit.
“That went splendidly, didn't it?” he exclaimed. “The pianoforte score
is a pretty stiff one, but I was sure”--smilingly--“from the downright
way you answered my question about accompaniments, that you'd prove
equal to it.”
Sara smiled back at him.
“I didn't think it necessary to make any conventional professions of
modesty--to you,” she said. “You don't--wrap things up much--yourself.”
He leaned against the piano, looking down at her.
“No. Nothing I say can make things either better or worse for me, so I
have at least gained freedom from the conventions. That is one of my few
compensations.”
“Compensations for what?” The question escaped her almost before she
was aware, and she waited for the snub which she felt would inevitably
follow her second indiscretion that afternoon.
But it did not come. Instead, he fenced adroitly.
“Compensation for the limitations of a hermit's life,” he said lightly.
“The life is your own choice,” she flashed back at him.
“Oh, no, we're not always given a choice, you know. This world isn't a
kind of sublimated children's party.”
She regarded him thoughtfully.
“I think,” she said gravely, “we always get back out of life just what
we put into it.”
His mouth twisted ironically.
“That's a charming doctrine, but I'm afraid I can't subscribe to it. I
put in--all my capital. And I've drawn a blank.”
His tone implied a kind of strange, numb acceptance of an inimical
destiny, and Sara was conscious of a rush of intense pity towards this
man whose implacably cynical outlook manifested itself in almost every
word he uttered. It was no mere pose on his part--of that she felt
assured--but something ingrained, grafted on to his very nature by the
happenings of life.
Rather girlishly she essayed to combat it.
“You're not at the end of life yet.”
He smiled at her--a sudden, rare smile of extraordinary sweetness.
Her intention was so unmistakable--so touchingly ingenious, as are all
youth's attempts to heal a bitterness that lies beyond its ken.
“There are no more lucky dips left in life's tub for me, I'm afraid,” he
said gently.
Sara seized upon the opening afforded.
“Of course not--if you persist in keeping to the role of looker-on,” she
retorted.
He regarded her gravely.
“Unfortunately, I've no longer any right to dip my head into the tub.
Even if I chanced to draw a prize--I should only have to put it back
again.”
The quiet irrevocableness of his answer shook her optimism.
“I--don't understand,” she said hesitatingly.
“No?”--his tones hardened suddenly. “It's just as well you shouldn't,
perhaps.”
The abrupt alteration in his manner took her by surprise. All at once,
he seemed to have retreated into his shell, to have become again the
curt, ironic individual of their first meeting.
“I think,” he went on, tranquilly ignoring the mixture of chagrin and
amazement in her face, “I think I hear the car coming round. You had
better put on your shoes and stockings again--they'll be dry now--and
then we can start. It's no longer raining.”
Sara felt as though she had been suddenly relegated to a position of
utter unimportance. He was showing her that, as far as he was concerned,
she was a person of not the slightest consequence, treating her like an
inquisitive child. Their recent conversation, during which his mantle of
reserve had slipped a little aside, the music they had shared, when for
a brief time they had walked together in the pleasant paths of mutual
understanding, all seemed to have receded an immense distance away. As
she took her place in the car, she could almost have believed that the
incidents of the afternoon were a dream, and nothing more.
Trent sat silently beside her, his attention apparently concentrated on
the driving of the car. Once he asked her if she were warm enough, and,
upon her replying in the affirmative, lapsed again into silence.
Gaining security from his abstraction, Sara ventured to steal a
side-glance at his face. It was a curiously contradictory face, hard
and bitter-looking, yet the reckless mouth curved sensitively at the
corners, and the tolerant, humorous lines about the eyes seemed to
combat the impression of almost brutal force conveyed by the frowning
brows and square, dominant chin.
Always acutely sensible of temperament, Sara felt as though the man
beside her might be capable of any extreme of action. Whatever decision
he might adopt over any given matter, he would hold by it, come what
may, and she was aware of an odd reflex consciousness of feminine
inadequacy. To influence Garth Trent against his convictions would be
like trying to deflect the course of a river by laying a straw across
its track.
The primitive woman in her thrilled a little, responsively, and she
wondered whether or no her sex had played much part in his life. He was
a woman-hater--so Molly had told her--yet Sara could imagine him in a
very different role. Of one thing she was sure--that the woman who was
loved by Garth Trent would anchor in no placid back-water. Life, for
her, would hold something breathless, vital, exultant . . .
“Well, have you decided yet?”
The ironical voice broke sharply into the midst of her fugitive
thoughts, and Sara jumped violently, flushing scarlet as she found
Trent's eyes surveying her with a quietly quizzical expression.
“Decided what?” she asked defensively.
“Where to place me--whether among the sheep or the goats. You were
dissecting my character, weren't you?”
He waited for an answer, but Sara maintained an embarrassed silence. He
had divined the subject of her thoughts too nearly.
He laughed.
“The decision has gone against me, I see. Well, I'm not surprised. I've
certainly treated you with a rather rough-and-ready kind of courtesy.
You must try to pardon me. A hermit gets little practice at entertaining
angels unawares.”
Sara, recovering her composure, regarded him placidly.
“You might find many opportunities for practice in Monkshaven,” she
suggested.
“In Monkshaven? Are you trying to suggest that I should ingratiate
myself with the leading lights of local society?”
She nodded.
“Why not?”
He laughed as though genuinely amused.
“Perhaps you've not been here long enough yet to discover that the
amiable inhabitants of Monkshaven look upon me as a sort of cross
between a madman and a criminal who has eluded justice.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Oh, mine, I suppose”--quickly. “But it doesn't matter--since I regard
them as a set of harmless, conventional fools. No, thank you, I've no
intention of making friends with the people of Monkshaven.”
“They're not all conventional. Some of them are rather interesting--Mrs.
Maynard, for instance, and the Herricks.”
He gave her a keen glance.
“Do you know the Herricks?”
“Yes. Why don't you go to see them sometimes? Miles--”
“Oh, Miles Herrick's all right. I know that,” he interrupted.
“It's very bad for you to cut yourself off from the rest of the world,
as you do,” persisted Sara sagely.
He was silent for a while, his eyes intent on the strip of road that
stretched in front of him, and when he spoke again it was to draw her
attention to the effect of the cloud shadows moving across the sea,
exactly as though nothing of greater interest had been under discussion.
She began to recognize as a trick of his this abrupt method of
terminating a conversation that for some reason did not please him.
It was as conclusive as when the man at the other end of the 'phone
suddenly “rings off” without any preliminary warning.
By this time they had reached the steep hill that approached directly to
the Selwyns' house, and a couple of minutes later, Trent brought the car
to a standstill at the gate.
“You have nothing to thank me for,” he said, curtly dismissing her
expression of thanks as they stood together on the path. “It is I
who should be grateful to you. My opportunities of social
intercourse”--drily--“are somewhat limited.”
“Extend them, then, as I advised,” retorted Sara.
“Do you wish me to?” he asked swiftly, and his intent eyes sought her
face with a sudden hawk-like glance.
Her own eyes fell. She was conscious, all at once, of an inexplicable
agitation, a tremulous confusion that made it seem a physical
impossibility to reply.
But he still waited for his answer, and, at last, with an effort she
mastered the nervousness that had seized her.
“I--I--yes, I do wish it,” she said faintly.