The Making of a Prig Part 34

"I--I am glad it didn't come off, Ted," she said, trying to speak lightly. Ted gripped her hand for a moment, and then let it go again, as though he were half ashamed of his momentary show of sentiment.

"You see," he went on, in a very gruff voice, "that was the only part I left to Providence, and Providence m.u.f.fed it. I'm such a rotten a.s.s,-- I always was, don't you know? If it had been you, now, you wouldn't have bungled it at all, would you?"

"Providence never has any sense of humour," said Katharine; and she got up hurriedly, so that he should not see her face. She poured out some medicine, and brought it to him.

"I say, it's awfully ripping to have you to look after me like this,"

he observed. "What did Miss Esther say?"

"She seemed upset," said Katharine, smiling slightly. "But you can always square Aunt Esther, when it's a question of illness; there are such a lot of texts in the Bible about illness, don't you know? By the way, when did you last have something to eat?"

Ted had no idea, beyond a vague notion that some one had brought him something on a tray in the morning, which he had not looked at. So she left him to interview the landlady, whom she found in the middle of a long history of the print in the hall and of the part it had played in the history of her own family as well, to which the Rector was listening patiently though with obvious inattention. Katharine managed to procure what she wanted, and returned with it to the sick room. The invalid was looking more flouris.h.i.+ng than ever.

"You see," he explained, between the spoonfuls with which she fed him, "he's such an awfully snide doctor. He won't let me get up, and of course, I'm as right as rain, really. So cheap of him, isn't it?"

In spite of his a.s.sertion, however, he was very glad to play the invalid when she brought him some warm water, and proceeded to bathe his hands and face. It was pleasant, after the desolation of his life for the past six months, to lie back in a lazy att.i.tude without feeling particularly ill, and allow the girl he liked best in the world to do things for him.

"It's so rum," he remarked, "that our hands never wear out with being washed so often. I can't think why they don't want soling and heeling after a time, like boots."

"I think you are right, and that your doctor _is_ rather 'snide,'" was all Katharine said, as she carried away the basin, and looked for his hair brushes. Ted's toilet table was characterised by a luxurious confusion, and she lingered for a moment to arrange the silver-topped bottles in some kind of order. "You never used to care for this sort of thing," she remarked, holding up a bottle of _eau de toilette_; "I remember how you teased me once, when I told you I put lavender water in my cold bath."

"Oh, well, of course it's beastly rot and all that," owned Ted; "but it's the thing to do, and one must, don't you know? Hullo, what are you playing at now?"

"I wish you would not be quite so languid," retorted Katharine. "How am I to brush your hair if you persist in behaving as though you were dying? I believe you are putting it on."

"It's not my fault if I'm not so beastly energetic as you," grumbled Ted. "Don't play about any more, Kit; come over here and talk. And you needn't fold up those towels; they're not used to it, really."

"I shouldn't think they were, from the look of them. Well, what have I got to talk about?"

She came and sat down on the chair by his side, and he s.h.i.+fted his position so that he could see her face. She could have laughed aloud at his expression of utter contentment.

"Oh, some rot; anything you like. You've always got lots to gas about, haven't you? How is Ivingdon, and the Grange; and does Peter Bunce still come in on Sunday afternoons; and has the doctor got any new dogs? Fire ahead, Kit! you've been down there doing nothing all this time, and you must know all there is to know, unless you're as half alive as you used to be. Hasn't anything happened to the old place?"

"Yes," said Katharine, smiling back at him frankly. "They have mended the gap in the hedge."

"The devil they have!" cried Ted. "We'll have it broken open again at once, won't we? Why didn't you stop them? You knew I wasn't there to tell them myself. Just like their confounded impertinence!"

"Hush," interrupted Katharine. "You mustn't get excited, old man; it isn't good for you."

She smoothed his pillows and arranged his coverlet with nervous rapidity, and Ted, submitting happily to her services, wondered innocently what she was blus.h.i.+ng about. But he did not trouble himself to find out.

"I am beastly glad I poisoned myself," he murmured, with lazy satisfaction.

She was glad of the diversion when the Rector arrived at last, and she was allowed to escape into the next room.

"Well, my boy, and how has the world gone with you?" she heard her father say in his genial tones.

"It's a beastly jolly world, and I'm the jolliest brute in it," was Ted's reply.

They took rooms in the next street, and came in every day to look after him; and when neither the conscience of the "snide" doctor, nor the desire of the invalid to be nursed proved sufficient to preserve the farce of his illness any longer, they still lingered on under pretence of being wanted, and sent carefully worded letters to Miss Esther from which she was forced to conclude that their presence in town was urgently required, much as they would have wished it otherwise. What really happened was, that Ted and Katharine regularly conducted the old Rector to the British Museum every morning, and pa.s.sed the day alone together until it was time to fetch him away again in the afternoon. And in the evenings they initiated him into the joys of a music hall, or introduced him to a new comedian; and the Rector was happier than he had ever been since the well-remembered days in Paris. As for Katharine, her feelings defied her own powers of description; she only knew that she had the sensation of waking up from a long, bad dream. Perhaps Ted felt the same. "You've cured the biggest hump I ever had in my life," was the way he expressed it.

Looking back on the even tenor of those few weeks, afterwards, Katharine was at a loss to remember what she had talked about to Ted in the many hours they had spent together. Perhaps they had not talked at all; at the time it never seemed to matter whether they did or not; at all events, their conversation usually lacked the personal element that alone makes conversation distinctive. There was nothing surprising to Katharine in this: as long as she could remember Ted had been the one person in the world to whom it was impossible to talk about one's self; and his sympathy for her was as completely superficial as her love for him was mainly protective.

Once or twice she was led inadvertently into making a confidant of him.

"I wonder why I never seem to feel things acutely now," she said to him one day as they were strolling along the Embankment. "I don't seem to care a bit what happens next, except that I have a sort of conviction it is going to be pleasant. I seem to want waking up again.

Do you know what I mean, Ted?"

"Oh, it's nothing; you're feeling played, that's all," answered Ted, rea.s.suringly. "My experience is that you're either played, or you're not played; and when you are, you'd better have a drink to buck you up. We'll have a cab, and lunch somewhere. Where shall we go to-day?"

And Katharine laughed at his practical view of things, and wondered why she had expected him to understand. Another time, it was Ted himself who gave the conversation a personal turn.

"Humps are deuced odd things," he observed, rather suddenly. It was a dull, warm afternoon in December, and they had been sitting idly for some minutes on one of the benches in the park, overlooking the Serpentine. "You feel that everything is awfully decent, and bills be hanged, and all that; and you curse your tailor and have a good time, and it doesn't matter if it snows. And then, when it's rather a bore to be under an obligation to a rotten little tradesman, or you want a new coat or something, and you pay up and feel awfully virtuous and don't owe a blessed halfpenny in the world, except for s.h.i.+rts and things that never expect to be paid for,--_then_, you go and get the very deuce of a hump."

"Whole books might be written on the psychological aspect of the hump," murmured Katharine.

"Look at those bounders, now," said Ted, who had not heard her. "It doesn't matter to _them_ that rowing on the Serpentine on Sat.u.r.day afternoon isn't the thing to do, especially in frock coats and bowlers. It makes one quite sorry for them, to see how little they know; they don't even know they are bounders, poor devils! But _they_ never get the hump, confound them!"

"All the same," said Katharine, "it is a big price to pay for an immunity from humps, isn't it?"

"Life must be awfully easy, if you're a bounder," continued Ted. "You haven't got to be in good form, and you can walk about with any sort of girl you please, and you needn't worry about the shape of your hat, and it doesn't matter if you are seen on a green Brixton 'bus. It saves so much thinking, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Katharine. "But you have to be a bounder all the same, and you know you can't even contemplate such a possibility, or impossibility, without shuddering. By the way, is all this intended to convey that you have got the hump this afternoon?"

"Oh, no," said Ted, with restored cheerfulness. "I ought never to have been born, of course; but that's quite another matter."

Late that evening the Rector proposed returning to Ivingdon. They had just been to the theatre, and Ted had asked them in to supper afterwards. Every trace of his mood of that afternoon had disappeared, and he was wrangling with Katharine over the strength of the Rector's toddy with all the energy of which his languid nature was capable.

Katharine put down the tumbler she was holding and looked swiftly round at her father.

"Oh, daddy, not yet!" she cried impetuously. "I am happy now; don't let us spoil it all by going home. I feel as though something horrible would happen if we went home now. Can't we wait a little longer? I have never been happy like this before."

The Rector murmured something about its being three weeks to Christmas, but his sense of duty was obviously a perfunctory one, and he soon found he was not being listened to. And Ted's hand closed over her fingers as he took the hot gla.s.s from her, and his face shone with pleasure and his voice trembled, as he whispered, "Thank you for that, dear."

She did not shrink from him as she had done once before when he had looked at her with that same eager expression in his eyes.

"I don't know a bit whether I love him in the real way," she told her mirror that night. "I don't know anything about myself at all. I believe the prig is inborn in me, after all, and that it would suit me far better to fight for a living in the world, than to stay at home and just make Ted happy. But all the same, if he asks me again I shall marry him. It has been so peaceful lately, and I have felt so happy, and marriage with Ted will mean peace if it doesn't mean anything more thrilling than that. Dear old Ted; why isn't he my brother, or my son, or some one I could just mother, and go on living my own life the while? Ah, well, he is going to be my husband; how strange it sounds!

I wonder if women like me are ever allowed to be happy in their own way, gloriously and completely happy as I know I could be? But I suppose it is only the prig in me that thinks so. And Ted shall never know that I want more than he can possibly give me. Oh, Ted, old chum, I do love you so for loving me!"

A visit to Queen's Crescent slightly unsettled her. She took her father with her and introduced him to Phyllis Hyam, and tried to convince herself that she was glad she was not coming back any more; but in spite of the unfamiliarity of being there as a visitor, and the difficulty of finding topics of conversation for the Rector and Miss Jennings, who obviously misunderstood each other's attempts to be friendly, the sight of the dingy little hall and of Phyllis's round, good-humoured face, brought enough reminiscences to her mind to make her a little regretful as well.

"Do you still have bread and treacle, and is Polly Newland glad I have gone, and does any one ever talk about me?" she asked with interest.

Even Phyllis looked strange, as though her best dress had been thrown on hurriedly and the distinction of being admitted to "Jenny's" room were rather too much for her; but there was a familiarity about her style of conversation that was consoling.

"Oh, yes," she replied in her off-hand way; "when we have a new one put into our room we always remember how blue you looked the first night you came. We haven't had a 'permanent' in our room since you left; and there have been some cheerful specimens, too! One was a nurse, who made the place smell eternally of disinfectants; and another kept bits of food in her drawer, and encouraged mice; and a third insisted on having the window shut. The curtains haven't been washed, either, since you made that row about them. I say, when are you coming back again?"

"You don't offer much inducement," laughed Katharine. "But I am not coming back, in any case."

"Going to get married?" asked Phyllis sharply. Katharine smiled, and did not contradict her. It was not an insinuation that one would be anxious to contradict in a place like Queen's Crescent, however diffident one might feel about it elsewhere. Phyllis shrugged her shoulders. "Well, don't go and make a hash of it," she said. "You're not the sort to be happy with any one, especially if it's made too easy for you. Well off? Of course; and wors.h.i.+ps the ground you tread on, I suppose! Oh, well, it's none of my business, and I only hope you haven't made a mistake. It's a risky thing at the best; and you were very happy here most of the time, and you've got to better that, you know. I wish you luck, I'm sure, but it takes a woman to understand any one like you, and I should like to see the man who thinks he does it as well."

"I hope you will some day," said Katharine, politely. But Phyllis did not respond with any warmth, and Katharine was glad to return to the masculine indifference of Ted. It was difficult to worry about the future in Ted's company; even the fact that he had not yet formally proposed to her did not seem to cause him any anxiety. It certainly made no difference in the freedom of their intercourse; and, as long as there was no immediate necessity for action, Ted was not the one to take the initiative. "I believe I shall have to propose to him myself," was the thought that sometimes crossed her mind as she studied his placid, good-looking face. But after her visit to Queen's Crescent, she began to wish he would not be quite so casual about it; for, without allowing even to herself that Phyllis's want of encouragement had in any way affected her decision, she had a lingering feeling that the present state of things could not go on for ever, and that it would be better for her, at all events, to have the matter definitely settled. So she made a kind of attempt, a day or two later, to rouse his apprehensions.