Miss Arnott's Marriage Part 26

"You are also a very young lady."

"Well again?"

"From such a young lady the world would--not unnaturally--expect a certain course of action."

"How do you mean?"

"Why don't you take up that position in the world to which you are on all accounts ent.i.tled?"

"Still I don't quite understand."

"Then I will be quite plain--why do you shut yourself up as if, to use a catch phrase, you were a woman with a past?"

Miss Arnott started perceptibly--the question was wholly unexpected.

Rising from her chair she began to re-arrange some flowers in a vase on a table which was scarcely in need of her attentions.

"I was not aware that I did."

"Do you mean that seriously?"

"I imagined that I was ent.i.tled to live the sort of life I preferred to live without incurring the risk of criticism--that is what I mean."

"Already you are beginning to be offended. Let us talk of the garden.

How is it looking? Your uncle was very proud of his garden. I certainly never saw anything finer than his roseries. Do you still keep them up?"

"Never mind the roseries, or the garden either. Why do you advise me not to move a finger in defence of an innocent man, merely because I choose to live my own life?"

"You put the question in a form of your own; which is not mine. To the question as you put it I have no answer."

"How would you put it?"

"Miss Arnott, in this world no one can escape criticism;--least of all unattached young ladies;--particularly young ladies in your very unusual position. I happen to know that nothing would have pleased your uncle better than that you should be presented at Court. Why don't you go to Court? Why don't you take your proper place in Society?"

"Because I don't choose."

"May I humbly entreat you to furnish me with your reasons?"

"Nor do I choose to give you my reasons."

"I am sorry to hear it, since your manner forces me to a.s.sume that you have what you hold to be very sufficient reasons. Already I hear you spoken of as the 'Peculiar Miss Arnott.' I am bound to admit not wholly without cause. Although you are a very rich woman you are living as if you were, relatively, a very poor one. Your income remains practically untouched. It is acc.u.mulating in what, under the circ.u.mstances, I am constrained to call almost criminal fas.h.i.+on. All sorts of unpleasant stories are being connected with your name--lies, all of them, no doubt; but still, there they are. You ought to do something which would be equivalent to nailing them to the counter. Now there is this most unfortunate affair upon your own estate. I am bound to tell you that if you go out of your way to a.s.sociate yourself with this man Baker, who, in spite of what you suggest, is certainly guilty in some degree, and who, in any case, is an irredeemable scoundrel; if you persist in pouring out money like water in his defence, although you will do him no manner of good, you may do yourself very grave and lasting injury."

"That is your opinion?"

"It is."

"I thank you for expressing it so clearly. Now may I ask you for the name of the gentleman--the expert criminal lawyer--to whom you referred? and then we will change the subject."

He gave her the name, and, later, in the seclusion of his own chamber, criticised her mentally, as Mr Whitcomb once had done.

"That girl's a character of an unusual kind. I shouldn't be surprised if she knows more about that lamentable business in Cooper's Spinney than she is willing to admit, and, what's more, if she isn't extremely careful she may get herself into very serious trouble."

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE FOUR CROSS-ROADS

The next morning Miss Arnott sent a groom over to Oak Dene with this curt note:--

"I shall be at the Wycke Cross--at the four crossroads--this afternoon at half-past three, alone. I shall be glad if you will make it convenient to be there also. There is something which it is essential I should say to you.

V. A."

The groom brought back, in an envelope, Mr Hugh Morice's visiting card.

On the back of it were four words,--

"I will be there."

And Mr Hugh Morice was there before the lady. Miss Arnott saw his car drawn up by the roadside, long before she reached it. She slackened her pace as she approached. When she came abreast of it she saw that its owner was sitting on a stile, enjoying a pipe. Taking his pipe out of his mouth, his cap off his head, he advanced to her in silence.

"Am I late?" she asked.

"No, it is I who am early."

They exchanged glances--as it were, neutral glances--as if each were desirous, as a preliminary, of making a study of the other. She saw--she could not help seeing--that he was not looking well. The _insouciance_ with which, mentally, she had always a.s.sociated him, had fled. The touch of the daredevil, of the man who looks out on to the world without fear and with something of humorous scorn, that also had gone. She did not know how old he was, but he struck her, all at once, as being older than she had supposed. The upper part of his face was seamed with deep lines which had not always, she fancied, been so apparent. There were crow's-feet in the corners of his eyes, the eyes themselves seemed sunken. The light in them was dimmed, or perhaps she only fancied it. It was certain that he stooped more than he had used to do. His head hung forward between his broad shoulders, as if the whole man were tired, body, soul and spirit. There was something in his looks, in his bearing, a suggestion of puzzlement, of bewilderment, of pain, which might come from continuous wrestling with an insistent problem which defied solution, which touched her to the heart, made her feel conscious of a feeling she had not meant to feel. And because she had not intended to harbour anything even remotely approaching such a feeling, she resented its intrusion, and fought against herself so that she might appear to this man to be even harder than she had proposed to be.

On his part he saw, seated in her motor car, a woman whom he would have given all that he possessed to have taken in his arms and kept there.

His ac.u.men was greater, perhaps, than hers; he saw with a clearness which frightened him, her dire distress, the weight of trouble which bore her down. She might think that she hid it from the world, but, to him, it was as though the flesh had been stripped from her nerves, and he saw them quivering. He knew something of this girl's story; this woman whose childhood should have been scarcely yet behind her, and he knew that it had brought that upon her face which had no right to be there even though her years had attained to the Psalmist's span. And because his whole nature burned within him with a desire that she might be to him as never woman had been before, he was unmanned. He was possessed by so many emotions, all warring with each other, that, for the moment, he was like a helmless s.h.i.+p, borne this way and that, he knew not why or whither.

Then she was so hard, looked at him out of eyes which were so cold, spoke to him as if it were only because she was compelled that she spoke to him at all. How could he dare to hint--though only in a whisper--at sympathy, or comfort? He knew that she would resent it as bitterly as though he had lashed her with a whip. And, deeming herself the victim of an outrage, the probabilities were that she would s.n.a.t.c.h the supposit.i.tious weapon out of his hand and strike him with all her force with the b.u.t.t of it.

So that, in the end, her trouble would be worse at the end than it had been at the beginning. He felt that this was a woman who would dree her own weird, and that from him, of all men in the world, she would brook only such interference, either by deed word, as she herself might choose to demand.

When they had done studying one another she put her hand up to her face, as if to brush away cobwebs which might have been spun before her eyes, and she asked,--

"Shall we talk here?"

His tone was as stiff and formal as hers had been.

"As you please. It depends upon the length to which our conversation is likely to extend. As I think it possible that what you have to say may not be capable of compression within the limits of a dozen words, I would, suggest that you should draw your car a little to one side here, where it would not be possible for the most imaginative policeman to regard it as an obstruction to the traffic which seldom or never comes this way; and that you should then descend from it, and say what you have to say under the shade of these trees, and in the neighbourhood of this stile."

She acted on his suggestion, and took off the long dust cloak which she was wearing, and tossed it on the seat of her car. Going to the stile she leaned one hand on the cross bar. He held out his pipe towards her.

"May I smoke?"