The Good Comrade Part 33

"Go away!" was her only answer.

"Why did you send me away?"

"Because I wanted you gone."

"Because Captain Polkington is not dead? Is that it?"

"You are a dishonourable eavesdropper! No, it wasn't that."

He sat down on the chopping-block barricading her corner so that she could not get out without stepping over him. "Do you know it strikes me that you are not strictly honest either, at least not strictly truthful just now."

Julia tugged at her skirt; the chopping-block was on the hem and he on it so that she could not get free. "Will you please go," she said, with a catch in her breath. That is the worst of these half-suppressed, unspent storms of tears, they have such a tendency to return and break out again inconveniently.

"If it were not for Captain Polkington would you have sent me away?"

he asked.

"Y--e--s," she answered, fighting with her tears. "Oh, go! Please, please go!"

She crumpled herself into a small miserable heap and he leaned over the block and drew her into his arms.

For a moment she struggled, burrowing her head into his coat; there was a good deal of burrowing and not much struggling. "No, you wouldn't," he said to her hair, "you would have married me."

"I might have said I would, but I shouldn't really have done it," she contended without looking up. "I shouldn't when it came to the point.

You had better let me go, I am spoiling your coat, my face is all wet--and I don't know where my handkerchief is."

"Take mine, you will find it somewhere. Tell me, why would you not have married me when it came to the point? Because your courage failed you?"

No answer; then, "I can't find that handkerchief."

"You have not tried. Are you afraid to try? Are you afraid of me? Is that why you would not have married me--you would have been afraid to live at close quarters with me? Do you still think you don't know me well enough?"

"I don't know your name."

The answer was ridiculous, but he knew how the ridiculous touched even tragedies for Julia.

"Hubert Farquhar Rawson-Clew," he said solemnly. "Now--"

But whatever was to have followed was prevented, for at that moment she looked up, and for some reason, suddenly decided things had gone far enough, and so freed herself.

"I don't think it matters much what I should have done," she said, "or why, either. Father is not dead; you ought to know better than to talk about such a thing; it is bad taste."

"Does that matter in the simple life? I thought when you retired you were going to dispense with falsity and pretences, and say and do honestly what you honestly thought, when it did not hurt other people's feelings."

"So I do," she answered; "that is why, when I thought I was alone just now, I asked out loud how it was that father was still alive. Since then I have seen."

"What have you seen?"

"That it is to prevent me from making a great muddle of things. If he had been dead I dare say I should have married you--I may as well confess it since you know--and we both should have repented it ever afterwards. As it is, if I were free to-morrow, I would know better than to do it."

He did not seem much troubled by the last statement. "We should have had to talk things over," he said.

"No, talking wouldn't have been any good," she answered; "there is a great distance between us."

He looked down at the s.p.a.ce of red tiles that separated them. "That is rather remediable," he observed.

"Do you think I am not in earnest?" she said. "I am. There is a real barrier; besides all these things I have mentioned there is something else that cuts me off. I have a debt to pay you and until it is paid, if I were your own cousin, I could not stand on the same platform."

"A debt?" he repeated the word in surprise. His young cousin's loan to Captain Polkington had slipped his memory, and even if it had not, its connection with the present would not have occurred to him. Julia had been there, it is true, when the affair was talked of eighteen months ago, and he himself had unofficially paid the money to end the matter, but he never dreamed of connecting either her or himself with it now.

Still less would he have dreamed that she considered herself bound to pay him what her father had borrowed from another.

"What debt?" he asked, thinking the word must be hyperbolical, and meant to stand for something quite different, though he could not imagine what.

"You have forgotten?" she said. "I thought you had; that only shows the distance more plainly; you have one standard for yourself and another for me."

"Tell me what it is and let us see if we cannot compound it."

But she shook her head. "It can't be compounded," she said; "you will know when I pay it."

"And when will that be?"

"Ten years, twenty perhaps, I don't know. I thought once or twice before I could pay it--with the blue daffodil once, and once when I first got the cottage and things--I thought, to be sure, I could do it; it seemed a Heaven-sent way. But"--with a little glint of self-derision--"Heaven knows better than to send those sort of easy ways to the Polkingtons; they are ill-conditioned beasts who only behave when they are properly laden by fate, and not often then. Now you know all about it, so won't you say good-bye and go?"

"I don't know about it and, what is more, I don't care. I am not going to let this unknown trifle, this scruple--"

Just then there came the sound of voices outside; Mr. Gillat and Captain Polkington unwarily coming back before the coast was clear.

"Yes," Johnny was saying, "he came to see me in town, you know--or rather you, but you were out--"

"He came to see me? He"--there was no mistaking the consternation in the Captain's tone, nor his meaning either.

Julia and Rawson-Clew looked at one another; both had forgotten the Captain's existence for a moment; now they were reminded, and though the reminder seemed incongruous it was perhaps opportune.

"There is father," Julia said.

And he nodded. One cannot make love to a man's daughter almost in his presence, when the proviso of his death is an essential to any satisfaction. Rawson-Clew went to the door. "Good-bye," he said, "for the present."

"Good-bye for always," she answered.

She spoke quite calmly, in much the same tone when, on the morning after the excursion to the Dunes, she had bid him good-bye and tried to face the consequences alone. She had had so many tumbles with fate that it seemed she knew how to take them now with an indifferent face.

At least, nearly always, not quite--the wood block still lay before the corner in which she had crouched the marks on his coat where her tears had fallen were hardly dry. There was pa.s.sion and to spare behind the indifferent face, pa.s.sion that for once at least had broken through the self-mastery.

He held out his hand and she put hers into it. "Good-bye," he repeated; "good-bye for the present, brave little comrade."

CHAPTER XIX