The Parts Men Play Part 33

'No. That's all I know about him, except that he was transferred to some other battalion than Dinglederry Smyth's.'

She went over to a table and took a piece of notepaper from a drawer.

'Mr. Selwyn used to belong to the R.A.C.,' she said quickly. 'Would you do me a favour, Horace dear?'

He murmured his desire to be of service in any capacity. Hesitating a moment, she wrote hurriedly:

'_4th March 1915_, 2lA PARK WALK.

'DEAR MR. SELWYN,--Will you please come and see me as soon as you can? I am not on night-duty this week.--Yours sincerely, ELISE DURWENT.'

She sealed the envelope and handed it to Maynard. 'Please find out from the R.A.C. where he is, and ask them to send this note to him. I am ever so grateful, Horace.'

'I suppose,' he said, looking at the envelope, 'that this means the--the finish of my chances?'

She answered the question by wis.h.i.+ng him good luck in France, but there was a strange tremulousness in the softly spoken words.

He put out his hand shyly. 'Good-night, old girl,' he said, smiling with a sort of rueful boyishness.

She took his proffered hand, and then, obeying an impulse, stooped and pressed her burning cheek against it. 'Good-night, Horace,' she said softly. 'I hope you'll come back safe to be a fine husband for some nice girl.'

When he had gone, and his footsteps died away, she returned to the table.

Burying her face in her hands, she fought back the tears which surged to the surface. Her love for d.i.c.k, her own loneliness, a mad joy in the thought of seeing Selwyn again, a motherly pity for Maynard, a fury towards Marian, an incomprehensible yearning--she felt that her heart was bursting, but could not have said herself whether it was with grief or with joy.

III.

From the time that Austin Selwyn received the note there was nothing else in his mind--as in Elise's--but the coming meeting. As playwrights planning a scene, each went through the encounter in prospect a dozen times, reading into it the play of emotions which was almost certain to dominate the affair. Although completely ignorant of her motive in writing to him, Selwyn invented a hundred different reasons--only to discard them all. Nor was Elise more able to satisfy herself as to the outcome of the meeting. It was not his actions that were difficult to forecast, but her own. Would her dislike of him be intensified? Would she experience again the momentary rapture of that summer afternoon?

It was fortunate that another lover had appeared for Marian, so that the desertion of Maynard did not leave her moping untidily about the place.

She was one of those women who are so singularly lacking in self-sufficiency that, except when in the company of men, they are as fiat as champagne from which the sparkle has departed.

It so happened, therefore, that Elise was again alone the following evening, dreading Selwyn's arrival, yet impatient of delay.

A few minutes after eight she heard him knock, and going to the street door, opened it for him. The night was a vapourish, miserable one, blurring his figure into indistinctness, and when he spoke his voice was hoa.r.s.e, as though the damp tendrils of the mist had penetrated to his throat.

Answering something to his greeting, she led him through the hall into the sitting-room. He paused as he entered. Without looking back, she crossed to the fireplace, and kneeling down, stirred the fire.

'May I help?'

'No, thanks. I prefer to do it.'

Her answer had followed so swiftly on his question that he stopped in the act of stepping forward. She looked over her shoulder with a swift, searching glance.

His face was a tired gray, and the silk scarf thrown about his neck looked oddly vivid against the black evening-clothes and overcoat. But if his face suggested weariness, his eyes were alive with dynamic force.

The intensity of the man's personality strangely moved Elise. She felt the presence of a mind and a body vibrating with tremendous purpose--a man who drew vitality from others, yet charged them in return with his own greater store.

To her he seemed to have divorced himself from type--he had lost even the usual characteristics of race. With the thought, she wondered how far his solitary life had effected the transition, if his idealism had brought him loneliness.

'Won't you sit down?' she said hesitatingly.

He acquiesced, and took a seat in the chair from which Maynard had run the emotional gamut the previous evening.

'You look pale,' she said, drawing a chair near the fire. 'I hope you have not been unwell.'

'No--no; it is merely that I have been so little out of doors. I could not gather from your note what kind of work you were engaged in. I see you are an ambulance-driver. I congratulate you.'

His voice conveyed nothing but polite interest in an obvious situation.

With over-sensitive apprehension she listened for any suggestion of sarcasm that lay behind his words, but she could detect nothing beyond mere impersonal courtesy--that, and a far-off weariness, as of one who has pa.s.sed the borders of fatigue.

'I wrote to your mother,' he said, 'when I heard of your elder brother's death. It must have been a great grief to you all.'

She did not answer him. His manner was so cold that he might have been deliberately disposing of a number of prepared comments rendered imperative by the laws of polite intercourse.

'Why didn't you let us know you had seen d.i.c.k?' she said abruptly.

'Then--you have heard?' He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

'Only last night, by the merest accident. He might have been killed in France, and we should never have known about it.' Her words were resentful and swift. 'Will you please tell me about him?'

Omitting the incident of Archibald's tavern, Selwyn told of the chance meeting with d.i.c.k, the encounter with Johnston Smyth, the night at the rooms in St. James's Square, and the subsequent glimpse of them marching through Whitehall.

'Your brother asked me to say nothing,' he said calmly. 'That is one of the reasons why I did not let you know.'

'Had d.i.c.k changed at all?' she asked, trying to make her words as listless as his. 'I wish that you would tell me something that he said.

You must know more about him than just'----

'I don't think he had changed,' said Selwyn; and for the first time his voice was tinged with compa.s.sion. 'He spoke of you with a kind of wors.h.i.+p. I suppose you know how he idolises you.'

His dark eyes looked at her through partially closed eyelashes, but only the manner in which her fingers compressed the fold of her skirt betrayed the turmoil of her feelings.

'Is that all you can tell me?'

'That is all.' He made no attempt to elaborate the conversation or to introduce any new theme. The scene which had promised to be so dramatic was actually dragging with uncomfortable silences. She waited long enough for him to speak, but when he remained silent--it was a sardonic silence to her--she rose from the chair with the manner of one who has determined to bring an interview to a close.

'Thank you for coming so promptly,' she said. 'I am most grateful for your kindness to d.i.c.k--and I know enough of the law to realise that you were taking a risk in hiding him.'

'It was nothing at all,' he said. He looked at her for an indication that her questions were at an end.

'I hope you will be able to get a taxi,' she ventured helplessly.

For the first time he smiled, and she reddened with mortification. He had been so cool and unyielding, so bloodless, that he had forced her to a disadvantage. She knew he could not be ignorant of the strain of the affair on her, yet he had done nothing to ease it. If she could have projected her mind into his, she would have seen that his conduct was as inexplicable to himself as to her. He knew he was hurting her. Perhaps it was because her warm lips and crimson cheeks were creating a torment in his soul that he could not curb the impulse to wound her. It may have been the subconscious knowledge that where one can hurt one can conquer that dominated his actions. While she resented the invulnerability with which he guarded his own feelings, it is probable that any different att.i.tude on his part would have brought forth a more active unkindness on hers. When men and women love, strange paradoxes are found.

They went to the door together, and in the brighter light of the hall Elise saw for the first time that he was considerably thinner, and that his brow was like marble. She felt a little stab of pity for him, forgetting his own lack of sympathy towards herself; she caught a faint realisation of what he must have endured for it to have marked him so indelibly.

'Don't you think,' she said, 'that you ought to go to the seaside for a while? You are not looking at all well.'