A TIMELY DISCOVERY
When Arthur ran down the step and across the pavement, to take the hand
which his visitor held out to him over the carriage door, Mr. Sarradet
bowed politely, put his hat on, and turned on his heel. He was consumed
with curiosity, but he had no excuse for lingering. He walked up
Bloomsbury Street and along the east side of Bedford Square. But then,
instead of pursuing a north-westerly course towards his home, he turned
sharply to the right and, slackening his pace, strolled along Montague
Place in the direction of Russell Square. He went about twenty yards,
then turned, strolled back to the corner of Bedford Square and peered
round it. He repeated these movements three or four times, very slowly;
they consumed perhaps six or seven minutes. His last inspection showed
the carriage still at the door, though neither the lady nor Arthur was
visible. Evidently she was paying a call, as she had intimated; no
telling how long it might last! "Well, I must go home," thought Mr.
Sarradet, as he strolled slowly towards the east once more. He turned
and walked briskly back. Just as he reached again the corner from which
he had taken his observation, he made a sudden backward jump. He was
afraid that he was caught! For the barouche dashed by him at a rapid
trot, and in it sat the lady and Arthur Lisle. They did not see him;
their heads were turned towards one another; they appeared to be
engrossed in a lively conversation. The carriage turned westward, across
Bedford Square; Sarradet watched it till it disappeared round the corner
into Tottenham Court Road.
"That's quick work!" thought Mr. Sarradet; and in truth, if (as the
visitor's words implied) she had never seen Arthur Lisle before, the
acquaintance was going forward apace. Who could she be? He was vaguely
troubled that Arthur Lisle should have--or make--a friend like that. The
barouche somehow depressed him; perhaps it put him a little out of
conceit with the dimensions of that precious dowry; it looked so rich.
And then there had been the reserve, the distance, in Arthur's manner,
his refusal to follow up leads and to take cues, and the final fact that
the important question had (even though it were by accident) gone
unanswered. All these things worked together to dash Mr. Sarradet's
spirits.
He told Marie about his visit to Arthur. She was rather surprised at a
sudden fancy like that (for so he represented it) taking hold of him,
but her suspicions were not roused. When he went on to describe the
arrival of the other visitor she listened with natural and eager
interest. But the old fellow, full of his perplexities, made a false
step.
"She was in the house nearly ten minutes, and then--what do you think,
Marie?--they drove away together!"
"In the house ten minutes? Where were you all that time?"
"I was--er--strolling along."
"You must have strolled pretty slowly. Where did they overtake you,
Pops?"
He grew rather red. "I can't remember exactly----" he began lamely.
She knew him so well; his confused manner, telling that he had something
to conceal, could not escape her notice.
"I believe you waited round the corner to see what happened! Why did you
spy on him like that?"
"I don't see any particular harm in being a little curious about----"
But she interrupted him. His spying after the carriage threw suspicion
on his motives for his visit too. "Didn't you really go and see Mr.
Lisle about anything in particular?"
"Anything in particular, my dear? What do you mean? I asked him to drop
in to-morrow----"
"Did you talk about me?"
"Oh, well, you were mentioned, of course."
She leant her arm on the mantelpiece and looked down at him gravely. He
read a reproachful question in her glance, and fidgeted under it. "Have
you been meddling?" was what her gravely enquiring eyes asked. "Meddling
as well as spying, Pops?"
He was roused to defend himself. "You've got no mother, Marie, and----"
"Ah!" she murmured, as a quick flash of enlightenment came. That was
Aunt Louisa's phrase! She saw where it came from in a minute; it had
always supplied Mrs. Veltheim with a much desired excuse for
interfering. She went on in a hard voice--she was very angry--"Did you
ask Mr. Lisle his intentions?"
"Of course not. I--I only took the opportunity of finding out something
about his people, and--and so on. Really, I think you're very
unreasonable, Marie, to object----" and he wandered or maundered on
about his paternal rights and duties.
She let him go on. She had no more to say about it--no more that she
could say, without revealing her delicate diplomacy. She would do that
to nobody alive; she had never stated it explicitly even to herself.
There she left the affair, left the last word and a barren show of
victory to her father. How much mischief he had done she would find out
later--perhaps to-morrow, if Arthur Lisle came. But would he--now? It
was the effect of her father's meddling she feared, not that matter of
the lady's visit. She knew that he had other friends than themselves.
Why shouldn't one of them come and take him for a drive? It was Mrs.
Norton Ward, very likely. Her quarrel with her father about his meddling
even prevented her from asking what the visitor was like; whatever he
might do, she at least would show no vulgar curiosity.
Yet it was the coincidence of the visit with the meddling that did the
mischief. Without the first, the second would have resulted in nothing
worse than a temporary annoyance, a transitory shock to Arthur's
feelings, which a few days' time and Marie's own tact would have
smoothed over. As it was, his distaste for old Sarradet's inquisition,
an angry humiliation at having the pistol held to his head, a romantic
abhorrence of such a way of dealing with the tenderest and most delicate
matters, a hideous yet obstinate suspicion that Marie might be privy to
the proceeding--all these set his feelings just in time for the
unexpected visit.
The visit had been delightful, and delight is an unsettling thing. As
Mrs. Godfrey Lisle--or Bernadette, as she bade him call her--purred
about his room (so he put it to himself), still more when she declared
for sunshine and carried him off to drive with her--in Regent's Park
too!--he had felt a sudden lift of the spirit, an exaltation and
expansion of feeling. The world seemed wider, its possibilities more
various; it was as though walls had been torn down from around
him--walls of his own choice and making, no doubt, but walls all the
same. This sensation was very vague; it was little more than that the
whole atmosphere of his existence seemed fresher, more spacious and more
pungent. He owned ruefully that the barouche, the Cee-springs, the bay
horses and the liveries, might have had something to do with his
pleasure; he knew his susceptibility to the handsome things of material
life--the gauds and luxuries--and ever feared to catch himself in
snobbishness. But the essential matter did not lie there; his company
was responsible for that--Bernadette, and the way she had suddenly
appeared, and whisked him off as it were on a magic carpet for a brief
journey through the heavens; it seemed all too brief.
"I came as soon as ever I could," she told him. "I got Esther Norton
Ward's letter about you after we'd gone to Hilsey for Easter, and we got
back only yesterday. But I had terrible work to get leave to come. I had
to go down on my knees almost! Cousin Arthur, you're in disgrace, and
when you come to see us, you must abase yourself before Godfrey. The
Head of the House is hurt because you didn't call!"
"I know. It was awfully wrong of me, but----"
"I understand all about it. But Godfrey's a stickler for his rights.
However Sir Oliver and I managed to bring him round ("Who's Sir Oliver?"
asked Arthur inwardly), and when you've eaten humble pie, it will be all
right. Do you like humble pie, Arthur?"
"No, I don't."
"No more do I." But she was smiling still, and he thought it was little
of that stuff she would have to consume. "You see, you made quite an
impression on Esther. Oh, and Sir Christopher came down for a week-end,
and he was full of your praises too." She put on a sudden air of
gravity. "I drove up to your door in a state of considerable excitement,
and I had a momentary fear that the fat man with the black moustache was
you. However it wasn't--so that's all right." She did not ask who the
fat man really was; Arthur was glad--all that could come later.
In fact she asked him no questions about himself. She welcomed him with
the glee of a child who has found a new toy or a new playmate. There was
no hint of flirtation, no effort to make a conquest; a thing like that
seemed quite out of her way. There was no pose, either of languor or of
gush. The admiration of his eyes, which he could not altogether hide,
she either did not notice or took as a matter of course--something
universal and therefore, from a personal point of view, not important.
On the other hand he caught her looking at him with interest and
critically. She saw that she was caught and laughed merrily over it.
"Well, I do feel rather responsible for you, you know," she said in
self-defence.
Life does do funny things all of a sudden! He drove with her past the
Sarradets' house. He seemed, for the moment, a world away from it. They
drove together for an hour; they arranged that he should come to lunch
on a day to be fixed after consultation with Godfrey--it appeared that
Godfrey liked to be consulted--and then she set him down in the
Marylebone Road. When he tried, rather stammeringly, to thank her, she
shook her head with a smile that seemed a little wistful, saying "No, I
think it's I who ought to thank you; you've given me an afternoon's
holiday--all to myself!" She looked back over her shoulder and waved her
hand to him again as she turned down Harley Street and passed out of
sight. When she was gone, the vision of her remained with him, but
vaguely and rather elusively--a memory of grey eyes, a smooth rich
texture of skin, mobile changeable lips, fair wavy hair--these in a
setting of the richest apparel; an impression of something very bright
and very fragile, carefully bestowed in sumptuous wrappings.
He went to the Sarradets' the next evening, as he had been bidden, but
he went with laggard steps. He could not do what seemed to be expected
of him there--not merely because it was expected, though that went for
something considerable, thanks to his strain of fastidious obstinacy,
but because it had become impossible for him to--his feelings sought a
word and found only a very blunt and ungracious one--to tie himself up
like that. His great contentment was impaired and could no longer absorb
him. His sober scheme of happiness was crumbling. His spirit was for
adventure. Finality had become suddenly odious--and marriage presents
itself as finality to those who are not yet married. If he had not been
ready for the plunge before, now he was a thousand times less ready.
The evening belied the apprehensions he had of it. There was a merry
party--Mildred Quain, Amabel Osling, Joe Halliday, and half-a-dozen
other young folk. And Mr. Sarradet was out! Dining at his club with some
old cronies, Marie explained. There were games and music, plenty of
chaff and a little horseplay. There was neither the opportunity nor the
atmosphere for sentiment or sentimental problems. In gratitude to fate
for this, and in harmony with what was his true inward mood behind and
deeper than his perplexity, Arthur's spirits rose high; he chaffed and
sported with the merriest. Marie was easy, cordial, the best of friends
with him--not a hint of anything except just that special and pleasant
intimacy of friendship which made them something more to one another
than the rest of the company could be to either of them. She was just as
she had always been--and he dismissed his suspicion. She had known
nothing at all of Mr. Sarradet's inquisition; she was in no way to blame
for it. And if she were innocent, why, then, was not he innocent also?
His only fault could lie in having seemed to her to mean what he had not
meant. If he had not seemed to her to mean it, where was his fault,--and
where his obligation? But if he acquitted Marie, and was quite disposed
to acquit himself, he nursed his grudge against old Sarradet for his
bungling attempt to interfere between friends who understood one another
perfectly.
Marie watched him, without appearing to watch, and was well content. Her
present object was to set him completely at his ease again--to get back
to where they were before Mrs. Veltheim interfered and her father
blundered. If she could do that, all would be well; and she thought that
she was doing it. Had Mrs. Veltheim and Mr. Sarradet been the only
factors in the case, she would probably have proved herself right; for
she was skilful and tenacious, and no delicacy of scruple held her back
from trying to get what she wanted, even when what she wanted happened
to be a man to marry. There that toughness of hers served her ends well.
When he said good-night, he was so comfortable about the whole position,
so friendly to her and so conscious of the pleasure she had given him in
the last few weeks, that he said with genuine ruefulness, "Back to the
Temple to-morrow! I shan't be able to play about so much!"
"No, you must work," she agreed. "But try to come and see us now and
then, when you're not too busy."
"Oh, of course I shall--and I'm not at all likely to be busy. Only one
has to stop in that hole--just in case."
"I mean--just when you feel like it. Don't make a duty of it. Just when
you feel inclined for a riot like this, or perhaps for a quiet talk some
afternoon."
This was all just what he wanted to hear, exactly how he wanted the
thing to be put.
Yes, but Mr. Sarradet would not always be so obliging as to be out! The
thought of Mr. Sarradet, whom he had really forgotten, suddenly recurred
to him unpleasantly.
"That's what I like--our quiet talks," she went on. "But you've only to
say the word, and we'll have company for you."
Her tone was light, playful, chaffing. He answered in the same vein.
"I'll send my orders about that at least twelve hours beforehand."
"Thank you, my lord," and, laughing, she dropped him a curtsey.
He left them still at their frolic and went home rather early. He had
enjoyed himself, but, all the same, his dominant sense was one of
relief, and not merely from the obligation which officious hands had
sought to thrust on him, regardless of the fact that he was not ready to
accept it and might never be. It was relief from the sense of something
that he himself had been doing, or been in danger of doing, to his own
life--a thing which he vaguely defined as a premature and ignorant
disposal of that priceless asset. Together with the youthful vanity
which this feeling about his life embodied, there came to him also a
moment of clear-sightedness, in the light of which he perceived the
narrow limits of his knowledge of the world, of life, even of himself.
He saw--the word is too strong, rather he felt somehow--that he had
never really wanted Marie Sarradet to share, much less to be the
greatest factor in, that precious, still unexplored life; he had really
only wanted to talk to her about it, with her to speculate about it, to
hear from her how interesting it was and might become. He wanted that
still from her. Or at all events from somebody? From her or another? He
put that question behind him--it was too sceptical. He wanted still her
interest, her sympathy. But he wanted something else even more--freedom
to find, to explore, to fulfil his life.
So it was that Mr. Arthur Lisle, by a fortunate combination of
circumstances on which he certainly had no right to reckon, found out,
just in time, that after all he had never been in love--unless indeed
with his own comely image, flatteringly reflected in a girl's admiring
eyes.
Poor tender diplomatist! But possibly she too might make her own
discoveries.