The Return of the Prodigal Part 47

"Then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."

"If I only knew which _was_ the strongest."

"You'll know some day. In the long run, you see, the strongest is bound to win."

"Not necessarily. There might be a number of little ones that all together would be stronger still."

"Oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time--go for them, throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle, _stamp_!"

"You can't jump on your own shadow. You can't stamp on them if they're _you_."

He groaned. Miss Tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.

"You must let yourself go, Miss Tancred--let yourself go!" And he laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent, Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred voluptuous, volatile, victorious!

And then a thought struck him.

He turned and saw Miss Tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.

VI

Durant had an idea, or rather two ideas, one purely comic, the other comic or tragic, according to the way you took it. He first of all discovered that the Colonel was laying siege to the heart of Mrs.

Fazakerly, and at the same time conducting his campaign with an admirable discretion. There never was a little Colonel of militia so anxious to avoid committing himself. Not that the event could be considered doubtful for a moment. Measuring all risks, it was in the highest degree incredible that he would be called upon to suffer the indignity of repulse.

There was nothing extraordinary in that. To be sure, on the first face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs.

Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst of him; her intelligent little eyes had seen him as he was; she could lay a soft finger on all his weak spots. There was this to be said for the Colonel, that he was all on the surface; there was nothing, positively nothing, behind him. Besides, Mrs. Fazakerly was not exacting. She had not lived forty years in the world without knowing the world, and no doubt she knew it too well to ask very much from it. Then the fact remained that the Colonel was an immaculate gentleman, immaculately dressed, and he was not the only item in the program. Coton Manor would be thrown in, and there were other agreeable accessories. Mrs. Fazakerly's tastes were all of the expensive sort, and her ambition aimed at something vaster than the mere adornment of her own person. In her household she displayed a talent, not to say a genius, for luxurious order. But a little dinner at the cottage opposite the lodge gates had convinced Durant that this elegance of hers was of a fragile and perishable sort. The peculiar genius of Mrs. Fazakerly clamored for material and for boundless scope. It could not do itself justice under two thousand a year at the very least. As things stood its exuberance was hampered both as to actual s.p.a.ce (her drawing-room was only eighteen feet by twelve) and as to the more glorious possibilities that depend on income. At Coton Manor she would have a large field and a free hand.

Heaven only knew what Mrs. Fazakerly's mind was made up of; but quite evidently it was made up.

So far so good; but there was less certainty as to the Colonel's att.i.tude. As yet nothing was to be seen, so to speak, but his att.i.tudes, which indeed were extremely entertaining. The little gentleman was balancing himself very deftly on the edge of matrimony, and Durant watched with a fearful interest the rash advance and circ.u.mspect retreat, the oscillating hair's-breadth pause, the perilous swerve, and desperate contortion of recovery.

Durant felt for him; he had so much to lose. Under Miss Tancred the working of his household was already brought to such exquisite perfection that any change must be for the worse. He had found out what became of Miss Tancred in her mysterious disappearances. As far as he could see the business of the estate was entirely superintended by the lady. He came across her in earnest conversation with the gardener; he met her striding across the fields with the farm-bailiff; he had seen her once on her black mare inspecting some buildings on the farthest limit of the property, the obsequious builder taking notes of her directions. She was obviously a capable woman, a woman of affairs. He presumed that these matters, with her household and secretarial work, filled up her days; he knew too well that whist accounted for her evenings. He did not know if there was any margin, any dim intellectual region, out of time, out of s.p.a.ce, where Miss Tancred's soul was permitted to disport itself in freedom; she seemed to exist merely in order to supply certain deficiencies in the Colonel's nature. Mrs. Fazakerly had once remarked that Frida was "her father's right hand." It would have been truer to have said that she was right hand and left hand, and legs and brain to the student of meteorology. There had evidently been some tacit division of labor, by which she did all the thinking and all the work while he did the talking. Thus, to continue Durant's line of argument, the Colonel's comfort was secured to him without an effort on his part (otherwise it would not have been comfort); and when all was said and done Mrs. Fazakerly was a most indifferent player of whist.

Then there was the Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it go. To be sure, you can get rather more out of a piano; but pianos are pa.s.sionate things, ungovernable and slippery to the touch. The Colonel was fond of the humbler instrument that gave him the sense of accomplishment without the effort, the joys of the _maestro_ without his labor and his pain.

He was in a double dilemma. If he had to choose between Miss Tancred and Mrs. Fazakerly his choice would never be made. On the other hand, if he decided for both, his comfort would be more insecure than ever. There would be jealousy to a dead certainty; in all mixed households that was where the shoe pinched. To pursue that vulgar figure, the Colonel's daughter was like a pair of old and easy shoes made by a good maker, a maker on whom he could rely; a wife would be like new boots ordered rashly from an unknown firm. They would be his best pair, no doubt, but your best pair is generally the tightest. He had some trying years before him; and well, a man does not put on new boots for a long uphill scramble.

So the Colonel's breast was torn with internecine warfare, desire battling with habit, and habit with desire. No wonder if in that awful struggle the fate of one insignificant individual counted for nothing. Frida Tancred never had counted.

Durant admitted that his imagination was apt to work in somewhat violent colors, and that there might be a point of view from which the Colonel would tone down into a very harmless and even pathetic figure; for Mrs. Fazakerly he had no terrors. But there was the girl. It was hard to say exactly what he had done to her. Apparently he had taken her soul while it was young and squeezable, and had crushed it till it fitted into all his little habits; he had silenced her heart with commonplaces, and dulled her intellect with his incomprehensible fatuity. And through it all he had been the most innocent little gentleman alive. Oh, yes, he was pathetic enough in his way. He himself was only an instrument in the hands of irrepressible Nature who couples wild soul with tame, hot blood with cold blood, genius with folly, and makes her sport of their unhappy offspring. And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now.

That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coa.r.s.ely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of d.a.m.nable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. That was all nonsense; or, if it had any meaning at all, it could only mean that no nice man ever shows that he knows. The fact remained that if he had loved her he would not have known.

For the disagreeable circ.u.mstance itself he called Heaven to witness that he had not been to blame. He had been ready to do his part, to fall down and wors.h.i.+p the unknown Miss Tancred, the Miss Tancred of his vision. The hour had been ripe, the situation also, and the mood; the woman alone had failed him. Heaven knew he had done nothing to make her care for him. True, he had given her a certain amount of his society; since she found a pleasure in it he would have been a brute to deny her that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself--given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness on an afternoon when you have nothing better to do and they reward you with the devotion of eternity; for they have no sense of proportion. The awkward thing is that it lays you under an eternal obligation to do something or other for them, you don't know exactly what; an intolerable position for a nice man.

So Durant's first feelings were surprise, annoyance, and a certain shame. Then he began to feel a little flattered, being perfectly sure that Frida Tancred was not the woman to give herself away to any ordinary man. He was the first, the only one, the one in a thousand, who had broken down her implacable reserve. He ended by feeling positively proud of his power to draw out the soul of a creature so reticent and pa.s.sionless and strange.

His time was not yet up, and the question was: Ought he to go or stay? He would have found or invented some pretext, and left long ago, but that in him the love of pleasure brought with it an equal fear of giving pain. It would give pain to the Colonel (who, after all, had received him kindly) if he went before his time. By the art of graceful evasion Durant had escaped many such an old gentleman as the Colonel; but when it came to doing the really disagreeable and ungraceful thing it seemed that his courage failed him.

There was no doubt in Miss Tancred's mind on the delicate point. She was even capable of making a sacrifice to keep him.

He met her one morning riding on her black mare. Miss Tancred looked well on horseback; the habit, the stiff collar, the hard hat, were positively becoming, perhaps because they left no room for decorative caprice. She drew up, and Durant ran his hand lovingly over the warm s.h.i.+ning neck and shoulders of the mare. Miss Tancred's eyes followed the movements of his hand, then they traveled up his tall figure and down again.

"Your legs are rather long," said she, "and you're heavier than I am; but you can ride her if you like."

"I shouldn't think of it," said Durant, magnificently mendacious. He had been very early enlightened as to his chances with the mare; but the temptation to ride her had never died in him.

"Unless you ride," she continued, "there is nothing for you to do here. Then you'll be bored to death; and then, I suppose, you'll go?"

"And bury myself? And then?"

"You won't be buried long. You'll rise again fast enough, somewhere else."

"And what if I do go and do all these things?"

"Well, I don't want you to go--and do them."

She moved on, and he walked beside her, his hand on the mare's mane.

"I can't think why you've stopped so long. Every morning since you came I've been expecting you to go. I thought you'd say your father was dying, or that your partner was ill, and you had urgent business in town. It's what they all do. Do you know, we've asked no end of people down, and they never stay more than three days. They always get letters or telegrams, or something. No, I'm wrong; one man stopped a week. He sprained his ankle the first day, and left before he was fit to travel."

(Durant laughed. She really amused him, this _ingenue_ of thirty, with the face of a Sphinx and the conversation of a child.)

"And they never come again. There's something about the place they can _not_ stand."

They were walking leisurely together in full sight of Coton Manor.

She gazed at it anxiously.

"Does it--does it look so very awful?"

"Well--architecturally speaking--no, of course it doesn't."

"Ah, you're getting used to it. Do you know you'll have been here a fortnight next Monday?"

About the corners of her mouth and eyes there played a dawning humor.

"Come, that sounds as if you did want me to go."

"No it doesn't. How could it? If you don't believe me, here's the proof--you can ride Polly every day if you'll stop another week."

Another week! Most decidedly she had a sense of the monstrous humor of the thing. If she could see it that way she was saved. He had not the heart to kill that happy mood by a coa.r.s.e refusal; it would have been like grinding his heel on some delicate, struggling thing just lifting its head into life.

Besides, she had really touched him. His legs, as Miss Tancred had observed, were a little long, otherwise Durant had the soul and the physique of a tamer of horses. The sight of Polly filled him with desire that was agony and rapture; he saw himself controlling the splendid animal; he could feel her under him, bounding, quivering, pulsating, he himself made one with every movement of her nervous, pa.s.sionate body. It was too much. Beside that large, full-blooded pleasure, his scruples showed colorless and light as air.

That happened on a Friday. He had only two clear days more. He found himself seriously considering the desirability of staying over Monday.

VII