The Return of the Prodigal Part 51

It was the second evening of her stay, and the three were sitting out on the lawn together. She had been looking long and earnestly at her mysterious kinswoman.

"Frida, you really are a sort of cousin, aren't you?"

"So I've always been told."

"And Mr. Durant, is he a sort of cousin, too?"

"I never heard that."

"I'm afraid I have not the honor."

"That's odd. I thought he must be."

"Why?" asked Miss Tancred.

"Oh, because there's a likeness somewhere. Not in the face exactly, but--yes, there! Keep that expression on your face one minute, Mr.

Durant; now don't you see it?"

"See what?"

"It--the likeness. He looks terribly reserved somehow--a sort of wild-horses-shan't-draw-it-out-of-me expression, and yet so fearfully restless; and that's just like you."

There was an embarra.s.sed silence; and then Miss Chatterton again raised her cheerful voice.

"I say, Frida! you might tell me exactly what I'm in for. Are you two going to be horribly intellectual and clever and that sort of thing?"

"I'm not," said Miss Tancred.

"I'm not," echoed Durant.

"Thank Heaven! Because you both look as if you'd a tremendous lot in you. I wonder if you'll ever let it out."

"Not if we can help it," said Durant.

"There you are again! If you're not Frida's first cousin, you ought to be."

Durant smiled; he wondered whether the idea was more than the random frolicking of Miss Chatterton's brain. She was evidently a young woman of perception; but her perceptions had wings, and she threw them off from her in a manner altogether spontaneous, impersonal and free. It was nothing to her if they brushed against the truth sometimes in their irresponsible flight.

"You don't mind all these personal remarks, do you?"

"Not in the least," said Miss Tancred.

"For my part I rather like them," said Durant; but they both carefully avoided each other's eyes.

XI

Durant had a grievance against Miss Chatterton. He had been induced to lengthen his visit in order to entertain her, and Miss Chatterton refused to be entertained. His position at Coton Manor had thus become a humiliating sinecure. There was no earthly reason why he should stay any longer, and yet he stayed.

The fact was, that by this time he was really interested in other things beside the landscape. He had wondered how long Miss Chatterton would keep it up. He watched her, as one haunted guest watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the house, observing her manner and her appet.i.te at breakfast, the expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning and good-night. On the third day he thought he could detect a slight flagging; Miss Chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative than before. By the evening she was positively serious, and he judged that the iron had entered into her soul. Her manner to her cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more maternal. She had begun to pity Frida, as he had pitied her.

The two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads together, always exchanging confidences. And it was not only confidences but characters that they exchanged. It was a positive fact that as Miss Chatterton flagged Miss Tancred revived, she seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older.

Not that Miss Tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she had led was against that. She looked like a woman recovering from a severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong const.i.tution still battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating disease, disease counterfeiting recovery.

A wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch.

Durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he was now left completely to himself. Miss Tancred's manner intimated that she had done with him,--put him away in some dark cupboard of the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,--that she was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength.

If Durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finis.h.i.+ng the studies and sketches he had begun. He had made none of Miss Tancred.

One morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of gra.s.s above him.

He had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt the stir of footsteps in the gra.s.s, and a voice rang out clear from the terrace.

"If it would only make papa happy. I want him to be happy."

Durant could not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by the dread of hearing.

"My poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know what you want; but you want something more than that."

Durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too much absorbed to heed his warning, and Frida even raised her voice in answering:

"Yes, I'm afraid I do want something more. I know what you're thinking, Georgie. When women of my age go on like this it generally means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or both."

Durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point Miss Tancred had continued:

"I am not in love."

She spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting fact.

"You _are_ in love, Frida. You're in love with life, and life won't have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart."

Frida did not deny the accusation. They pa.s.sed on, and in the silence Durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn bush. He could only pray now that he might remain invisible.

He felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in pa.s.sing.

"Do you think he heard?"

This time it was Miss Chatterton who raised her voice.

"It doesn't matter if he did. He's not a fool, whatever else he is."

Durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his admiration of Miss Chatterton's masterly a.n.a.lysis and comprehension.

She had, so to speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her together again in a phrase--"Dying for love of life." Beside her luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies and undermined by monstrous a.s.sumptions. At the same time he persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps, of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a certain humble spectator of existence. According to the view he had once expounded to her the two pa.s.sions were inseparable.

Before very long he received a new light on the subject. It was his last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the Colonel was in bed with a bilious attack, and Durant was alone in the drawing-room.

He had not been alone long before Miss Chatterton appeared. She came into the room with an air of determination and sat down beside him.

She went straight to her point, a very p.r.i.c.kly one; there was no beating about the thorn bush with Miss Chatterton.

"Mr. Durant," said she, "I want to talk to you--for once. When you first came here what did you think of Miss Tancred?"