The Golden Web Part 31

Even after the door had closed upon Lord Nunneley, and Deane was alone with his fiancee, words did not seem to come easily to either of them.

Lady Olive was sitting back in the corner of a low couch. Deane was standing upon the hearthrug, his hands behind him, his face a little wrinkled with perplexity.

"I suppose," he said thoughtfully, "you would like me, Olive, to explain exactly how this claim came about?"

"On the contrary," she answered, "I do not wish you to do anything of the sort."

He looked at her in some surprise. Her voice had prepared him for a change of some sort, but he was nevertheless puzzled. There was a slight flush of color in her cheeks, and her eyes were softer than usual.

"Stirling," she said, "come and sit down here by my side."

He obeyed at once. She turned and faced him.

"I am puzzled, Stirling," she said. "I want to ask you a question. You have been lunching with my father?"

"Yes!" Deane answered. "At his club."

"I know that he feels very strongly about this matter," she said. "Tell me, did the suggestion that our engagement should be broken off come from him?"

"Certainly."

"And you?" she said. "Tell me exactly what you felt, what it meant to you? I don't want you to fence with words, please," she went on. "Tell me this honestly. Was it anything of a relief to you?"

"a.s.suredly not," he answered wonderingly.

"Think again," she begged. "You answer quickly, but is that because you are very, very sure, or because you are taking it for granted? You see you are one of those men, Stirling," she went on earnestly, "whose disposition does not allow them to look back. We are engaged, I was your deliberate choice, and after that, so far as you are concerned, the matter was ended. The possibility that you had made a mistake would never occur to you, simply because you would regard the matter as inevitable. Tell me, if it were not inevitable, if you were not engaged to me at this moment, Stirling, would you ask me again?"

Her words amazed him. He had never given her credit for such insight, such perceptions. It seemed, indeed, as though she had realized something of which he himself was not yet conscious, and yet something which might very well exist.

"How long have you had this idea, Olive?" he asked gravely.

"All the time," she answered. "At first, of course, it seemed all right, but up in Scotland, and since then, I have wondered whether you have not looked upon me as something quite outside your life,--a necessary and desirable adjunct, perhaps, to your household and growing prosperity.

Don't think that I am complaining," she continued, "but in all our recent communications the personal note has not been very strongly marked, has it? I can see exactly, too, how my father's suggestion has moved you. You don't feel, do you, as though the sun had ceased to s.h.i.+ne, or the world to move, because there is a chance that you may lose me?"

Deane was not often so doubtful of himself. In a sense he knew that she was right. And yet, her very apprehension of these things, the new earnestness with which she was looking at him, the thought that he was very near indeed to losing her, seemed to stimulate his interest,--made him feel, indeed, that it would not be a light thing to give her up.

"Olive," he said, "I wish I could make you know exactly how I feel. If I have been a little slow and reticent of speech, believe me, it is not that I have not cared. On the other hand, there is some truth in what you have said--I mean that I do honestly believe that I have taken things a little too much for granted, that knowing there was no other woman in my life, knowing how desirable you were, and how really fond of you I was, I think I was content to let the rest come, as I certainly did feel that it would come."

"I think I understand," she said slowly. "Now tell me exactly what you think of my father's request?"

"I think that it is reasonable," Deane answered. "It is more reasonable, even, than your father knows of. I think that I have been a little too successful, perhaps, during these later years of my life. I have grown to underestimate the possibilities of trouble."

"This is really serious, then?"

He nodded. "I am afraid," he said, "that I have been a little over-bold.

I ought to have kicked that man Hefferom out of my office half-a-dozen times, until he came to reason, and then bought him off for good for a thousand pounds. But you see I didn't. All my life I have hated compromises. I knew that he was a blackguard, and I dealt with him as a blackguard, and I have left him with the cards in his hands."

"Then I suppose my father was right," she said, sighing.

"I suppose he was," Deane answered.

She held out her hand. "Very well, Stirling," she said, "let it be so.

Our engagement is broken, and I will see that the proper steps are taken to announce it. But I want you to understand this from me, that if you had cared, if I could have seen any signs whatever of your caring, no word of my father's, nor anything that could have happened to you in the city or elsewhere, any disgrace or any loss of money, could have separated us."

He took a step towards her. "Olive!" he exclaimed.

"No!" she said, a little sharply, and rang the bell.

He turned and walked out. In the hall he pa.s.sed Lord Nunneley. "We have arranged it according to your wish, sir," he said, "your daughter and I."

Lord Nunneley looked at him curiously. Deane had the look of a man who has been hard hit.

"I am sorry, Deane. I hope you understand there's nothing personal in it."

"I understand!" said Deane, briefly.

CHAPTER XI

BITTER WORDS

From the pit of the world--from the Law Courts, hot and crowded, where the atmosphere was heavy with strife,--the modern battleground, where the fighting was at least as dramatic over the souls of men as on those other fields, reddened with their blood, Deane escaped to find himself, after a few hours' journey, in this strangest of churchyards upon the bare hillside. The church itself, squat, square-towered, and tumbling into decay, stood out like a watch-tower upon the cliff. The churchyard, bordered by low gray stone walls, seemed to contain little more than a dozen or so of graves, and from one of these Deane turned away, and with Winifred by his side commenced the long descent to the level of the sea.

The half-a-dozen who had attended the ceremony out of curiosity had already melted away. The parson, with his book under his arm, had gone into the vestry, but neither custom nor age had failed to rob those few sentences of their wonderful, threatening pathos. Even Deane was a little moved. The girl who walked by his side carried still with her that impenetrable mask, but there was something more like real sadness in the steady gaze of her unseeing eyes.

The air was filled with suns.h.i.+ne, the singing of larks, and the calling of the white-winged seagulls wheeling about their heads. Below, the sea had receded to its furthest limits. The creeks were dry. The sh.o.r.e was piled with ma.s.ses of fragrant seaweed. The gra.s.s-grown d.y.k.es which led down to the tower stood high and dry, like ribbons across the land.

Little sandy spits were visible, far out from the sh.o.r.e, and only the white-topped posts marked the way of the tidal river out beyond the island of seagulls and sand.

Deane, after his anxious days and his tearing ride from town in the great motor, felt the peace of all these things, showed it in his face, felt it in his heart. The last few days had taught him a good deal.

Never had he been so weary of his place in the great world as he was that afternoon. Even that little ceremony in the wind-swept churchyard, the coffin lowered into the grave, the heaping of earth, the simple words spoken by the bareheaded vicar,--even that little ceremony had left its impression. After all, how small the difference between Death and Life,--ignominy and greatness! His own reputation had many times during the last few days trembled in the balance. What was the value of that, even,--of all his wealth,--compared to the great primeval facts of life?

His thoughts suddenly turned to the girl by his side. He looked at her pityingly,--looked at her, too, with curiosity. She had accepted his coming almost as a matter of course. All the time, though he had known well that she was suffering, she had been wordless, as though her grief were something so great that no outward sign of it could be anything else but pitifully inadequate. In her quiet, graceful walk, the very reserve, the negativeness, so to speak, of her coloring, her speech, her looks, she still represented to him an insoluble enigma. Was it possible, now that her brother had gone, that she would speak? In any case, the silence between them could not continue much longer, for already they were down on the marshes, and, as though by common consent, had turned seaward, towards where the lonely gray tower stood out on its little sandy eminence.

"Tell me, Miss Rowan," he said, "what are your plans now?"

"My plans?" she repeated, without turning her head.

"Yes!" he went on. "I know that your brother's death is a blow to you, but remember that it was inevitable. It was a thing which was bound to come, and in many ways it was kinder and better that it should happen like this. You could not have chosen for him a more peaceful ending, a more peaceful resting-place. For anyone with even the faintest beliefs in the future life could anything be more beautiful than to rest there, with the eternal lullaby of the sea in his ears, free from encroachment, save the encroachment of nature herself?"

She turned to look at him, and the calm scrutiny of her level gray eyes somehow disturbed him. "It is easy for you to talk like that," she said.

"You are still young and strong, and if the pendulum of fate swings against you one day, it pays you back the next. You are selfish because you cannot help it. You cannot even realize the hideousness of death!

You cannot realize it because it comes to other people, and not to you!"

"You are a little unfair, Miss Rowan," Deane answered. "You must remember that your brother was a doomed man."

"Yes, but why?" she cried. "He was younger than you. There were no worse things in his life. Always he was battling with failure and disappointment. And this is the end,--to sit opposite a doctor, and be told you may live a month, three months, a measure of time. Oh! it's easy to think about it for other people! Think of yourself going about with the knowledge in your heart that as the days pa.s.sed one by one they brought you nearer to the end, that every morning when your eyes opened, instead of the joy of life would come once more that terrible fear."

"Your brother was not a coward, Miss Rowan," Deane said.