The God in the Car Part 34

But the frown dwelt a little longer on his face.

"Sit down here," she said, and they sat down in full view of Adela and the Baron, about twenty yards off.

"She's mad," murmured Adela, and the Baron muttered a.s.sent.

It was the time of the morning when everybody was out. Presently Lord and Lady Semingham strolled by--Lady Semingham did not see Maggie Dennison, her husband did, and Adela caught the look in his eye. Then down from the hill and on to the gra.s.s came Marjory Valentine. She saw both couples, and, for a perceptible moment, stood wavering between them. She looked pale and weary. Mrs. Dennison indicated her with the slightest gesture.

"You were asking for her. There she is," she said to Willie Ruston.

"Well, I think I'll go and ask her."

"What?"

"To come for a walk."

"Now?"

"Why not?" he asked with a surprised smile.

As he spoke, Marjory's hesitation ended; she joined Adela and the Baron.

"How rude you are!" exclaimed Mrs. Dennison angrily, "you asked me to come out with you."

"So I did. By Jove, so I did! But you don't walk, do you? And I feel rather like a walk now."

"Oh, if you prefer her society----"

"Her prattle," he said, smiling, "amuses me. You and I always discuss high matters, you see."

"She doesn't prattle, and you know it."

He looked at her for a moment. He had gone so far as to rise, but he resumed his seat.

"What's the matter?" he asked tolerantly.

Maggie Dennison's lip quivered. The week that had pa.s.sed had been a stormy one to her. There had been a breaking-down of barriers--barriers of honour, conscience, and pride. All she could do to gain or keep her mastery she had done. She had all but thrown herself at his feet. She hated to think of the things she had said or half-said; and she had seen Marjory's eyes look wondering horror and pitying contempt at her. Of her husband she would not think. And she had won in return--she knew not what. It hung still in the balance. Sometimes he would seem engrossed in her; but again he would turn to Marjory or another with a kind of relief, as though she wearied him. And of her struggles, of the great humiliations she suffered, of all she sacrificed to him, he seemed unconscious. Yet, cost what it might, she could not let him go now. The screen of Omof.a.ga was dropped; she knew that it was the man whose life she was resolute to fill; whether she called it love for him or what else mattered little; it seemed rather a mere condition of existence, necessary yet not sweet, even revolting; but its alternative was death.

She had closed her eyes for a moment under the stress of her pain. When she opened them, he was looking at her. And the look she knew was at last in his eyes. She put up her hand to ward it off; it woke her horror, but it woke her delight also. She could not choose whether to banish it, or to live in it all her life. She tried to speak, but her utterance was choked.

"Why, I believe you're--jealous," said Willie Ruston. "But then they always say I'm a conceited chap."

He spoke with a laugh, but he looked at her intently. The little scene was the climax of a week's gradual betrayal. Often in all the hours they had spent together, in all the engrossing talks they had had, something of the kind had appeared and disappeared; he had wondered at her changefulness, her moods of expansion and of coldness--a rapturous greeting of him to be followed by a cold dismissal--an eager sympathy alternating with wilful indifference. She had, too, fits of prudence, when she would not go with him--and then spasms of recklessness when her manner seemed to defy all restraint and mock at the disapproval of her friends. On these puzzles--to him, preoccupied as he was and little versed in such matters, they had seemed such--the present moment shed its light. He recalled, with understanding, things that had pa.s.sed meaninglessly before his eyes, that he seemed to have forgotten altogether; the ambiguous things became plain; what had been, though plain, yet strange, fell into its ordered place and became natural. The new relation between them proclaimed itself the interpretation and the work of the bygone week.

Her glove lay in her lap, and he touched it lightly; the gesture speaking of their sudden new familiarity.

Her reproach was no less eloquent; she rebuked not the thing, but the rashness of it.

"Don't do that. They're looking," she found voice to whisper.

He withdrew his hand, and, taking off his hat, pushed the hair back from his forehead. Presently he looked at her with an almost comical air of perplexity; she was conscious of the glance, but she would not meet it.

He pursed his lips to whistle.

"Don't," she whispered sharply. "Don't whistle." A whistle brought her husband to her mind.

The checked whistle rudely reflected his mingled feelings. He wished that he had been more on his guard--against her and against himself.

There had been enough to put him on his guard; if he had been put on his guard, this thing need not have happened. He called the thing in his thoughts "inconvenient." He was marvellously awake to the inconvenience of it; it was that which came uppermost in his mind as he sat by Maggie Dennison. Yet, in spite of a phrase that sounded so cold and brutal, his reflections paid her no little compliment; for he called the revelation inconvenient all the more, and most of all, because he found it of immense interest, because it satisfied suddenly and to the full a sense of interest and expectation that had been upon him, because it seemed to make an immense change in his mind and to alter the conditions of his life. Had it not done all this, its inconvenience would have been much less--to him and save in so far as he grieved for her--nay, it would have been, in reality, nothing. It was inconvenient because it twisted his purposes, set him at jar with himself, and cut across the orderly lines he had laid down--and because, though it did all this, he was not grieved nor angry at it.

He rose to his feet. Mrs. Dennison looked up quickly.

"I shall go for my walk now," he said, and he added in answer to her silent question, "Oh, yes, alone. I've got a thing or two I want to think about."

Her eyes dropped as he spoke. He had smiled, and she, in spite of herself, had smiled in answer; but she could not look at him while she smiled. He stood there for an instant, smiling still; then he grew grave, and turned to walk away. Her sigh witnessed the relaxation of the strain. But, after one step, he faced her again, and said, as though the idea had just struck him,

"I say, when does Dennison come?"

"In a week," she answered.

For just a moment again, he stood still, thoughtfully looking at her.

Then he lifted his hat, wheeled round, and walked briskly off towards the jetty at the far end of the expanse of gra.s.s. Adela Ferrars, twenty yards off, marked his going with a sigh of relief.

Mrs. Dennison sat where she was a little while longer. Her agitation was quickly pa.s.sing, and there followed on it a feeling of calm. She seemed to have resigned charge of herself, to have given her conduct into another's keeping. She did not know what he would do; he had uttered no word of pleasure or pain, praise or blame; and that question at the last--about her husband--was ambiguous. Did he ask it, fearing Harry's arrival, or did he think the arrival of her husband would end an awkward position and set him free? Really, she did not know. She had done what she could--and what she could not help. He must do what he liked--only, knowing him, she did not think that she had set an end to their acquaintance. And that for the moment was enough.

"A woman, Bessie," she heard a voice behind her saying, "may be anything from a cosmic force to a clothes-peg."

"I don't know what a cosmic force is," said Lady Semingham.

"A cosmic force? Why----"

"But I don't want to know, Alfred. Why, Maggie, that's a new shade of brown on your shoes. Where do you get them?"

Mrs. Dennison gave her bootmaker's address, and Lady Semingham told her husband to remember it. She never remembered that he always forgot such things.

The arrival of the Seminghams seemed to break the spell which had held Mrs. Dennison apart from the group over against her. Adela strolled across, followed by Marjory, and the Baron on Marjory's arm. The whole party gathered in a cl.u.s.ter; but Marjory hung loosely on the outskirts of the circle, and seemed scarcely to belong to it.

The Baron seated himself in the place Willie Ruston had left empty. The rest stood talking for a minute or two, then Semingham put his hand in his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of tracing-paper.

"We're all Omof.a.gites here, aren't we?" he said; "even you, Baron, now.

Here's a plan Carlin has just sent me. It shows our territory."

Everybody crowded round to look as he unfolded it. Mrs. Dennison was first in undisguised eagerness; and Marjory came closer, slipping her arm through Adela Ferrars'.

"What does the blue mean?" asked Adela.

"Native settlements."

"Oh! And all that brown?--it's mostly brown."

"Brown," answered Semingham, with a slight smile, "means unexplored country."