Across the Stream Part 23

"It was delicious of you to send them," she said. "And I've got--something for you."

"Hurrah!" said Archie. "What is it?"

She had put a half sovereign and a half-crown on the corner of the mantel-piece, and handed it to him.

"A tip?" he said.

"No; a bet. I am poor but honest."

He looked at the money.

"Twelve and six?" he said. "When did you bet me twelve-and-six?"

Helena came a step closer to him. Even in the middle of London there was something of sea-wind and open s.p.a.ces about Archie.

"Oh, you stupid boy!" she said. "How many half-crowns is that?"

Suddenly Archie remembered the wager he had made with her one morning in the Park, that Lord Harlow would propose to her before the end of the season. He pocketed the money with a shout of laughter.

"Ha! I knew I should win," he said, "but it wasn't nice of me to laugh.

I take back the laugh. Poor old Bradshaw! Did he mind much?"

Helena looked at him, still standing close to him, smiling and in silence. She really found him most attractive at that moment, and she wondered with how changed a face he would presently look at her.

"Yes, he proposed to me this afternoon," she said, still smiling, and still looking at him.

"Well, poor old Bradshaw!" said Archie once more. But he did not say it with quite the same confidence.

She laid her hand, that soft hand with sheathed claws, on his arm.

"Archie, aren't you going to wish me happiness?" she asked.

The lines of his laughter still lingered on his handsome mouth, but now they were merely stamped there and meant nothing.

"Wish you happiness?" he rapped out in a hard snappish voice.

"Yes; isn't it usual between friends?"

"Do you mean you've accepted him?" he asked.

"Yes, my dear. Haven't I told you?"

"Is it a joke?" he asked. "Shall I laugh?"

Helena moved a little away from him, and rang the bell. Archie looked so strange. She had expected something far more moving and dramatic than this wooden immobility.

"Tell Colonel Vautier and Miss Jessie that Lord Davidstow has come," she said to the parlour-maid.

Archie said nothing till the door had closed again. He felt that he was made of wood, that everything was made of wood, he and Helena and the roses he had sent, and the Persian rug on which he stood. And when he spoke, it was as if a machine in his mouth said the words which had nothing whatever to do with him.

"I congratulate you," he said. "I hope you will be very happy."

Colonel Vautier entered; he had been to the cellar to get out a bottle of champagne in which to drink the health of Helena and the man she had chosen.

"Good evening, my dear Archie," he said. "I know Helena has told you her news."

Archie shook hands, and then his eyes went back to Helena again. She had never looked more entrancingly pretty, but she was made of wood. And then Jessie came in; they were all there, and dinner was ready, and down they went. In this wooden world, everything went on in precisely the same way as it had done when people were made of flesh and blood. Some cunning mechanical contrivance enabled them to talk and smile and eat: food tasted the same and so did the champagne in which presently they drank Helena's health. It was the same p.r.i.c.kly, bubbly stuff, with a little sting in it, that he so seldom drank. But it unfroze the surface of the stricture that bound him, as when the first stir of a thawing wind moistens the surface of ice. He began to feel again, to be conscious that somewhere within him was a deep well of the waters of pain. But anything was better than that cataleptic insensibility, which was like being unconscious, and, all the time, knowing that he was unconscious.

They were not going out that night, and after dinner they sat down to a rubber of bridge, in which as usual Helena took Archie as a partner, because she always insisted that she could form some idea of the principles on which he played, whereas the other two but wandered in a starless and Cimmerian gloom when mated with him. But Helena claimed that her spiritual affinity with Archie enabled her to perceive that, when he declared hearts, he wished her to understand that he hadn't got any, and that she would do well to declare something different. "Bridge, properly understood," Archie had enunciated once, "is a form of poker: you must bewilder and terrify your adversary. And then the fun begins, and you get fined." What added to the hilarity was the concentrated seriousness which Jessie and her partner brought to bear on the game, and the miser's greed and avaricious eye with which Jessie was popularly supposed to see her score mounting. All these jokes, these squibs of light-hearted nonsense, were there to-night, but there was nothing behind them. It was as if they were spoken from habit; a frigid rehearsal of some pithless drama was going on; they were tinsel flowers stuck into arid and seedless ground, and sprang no longer from the warm earth.

The sense of wooden unreality soon began to close in again on Archie, with that utter absence of feeling which was so far more terrible than any feeling could be, that soulless insensitiveness as of a live consciousness that knew it was dead, and he rose from the table after Helena had delivered him from the consequence of some outrageous declaration, and went across to a side-table where were placed syphons and spirits. But now, instead of pouring himself out a gla.s.s of soda-water, he half filled his tumbler with whisky, and but added a cream of bubble on the top of it. Immediately almost his sense of touch with life returned; there stole back into himself and the figures of Colonel Vautier and Jessie the perception of their several ident.i.ties, and into Helena the love with which he had endowed her. But that, and all that it implied, was better than feeling nothing at all. He knew, too, that when Jessie spoke to him, or looked at him, her voice and her eyes held for him a supreme and infinite sympathy. He could not reach it, but he knew it was there. Perhaps when he got used to those new conditions of nightmare existence, he could make it accessible, get into touch with it. At present he scarcely wanted it; he wanted nothing so long as this perception of life still ran in his brain, except Helena.

He thought that she rather pitied him too, but it was not her pity he wanted, for it was she who had brought her pity on himself.

They played two or three rubbers; Jessie's miserly greed was a.s.suaged by precisely the sum that Archie had won from Helena, and Colonel Vautier, after seeing him out, went back to his study to indulge himself in the cigar which was not permitted in the drawing-room, and the two sisters were left there. Helena's brain had long been busy, beneath the habitual jests of their game, over her future relations with Jessie, and she had come to the conclusion that the sooner they talked the matter out the better. She found that it affected her comfort to be practically not on speaking terms with her sister, and, since she had no shrinking from what might be a painful interview for others, she had made up her mind to ascertain exactly how Jessie meant to behave to her in the few weeks for which they would be in close daily and hourly contact, for Lord Harlow had expressed his mind very clearly about an early date for their wedding, and Helena entirely agreed with him.

Jessie, on her part, could scarcely manage to think about her sister at all. With Archie in front of her all evening she had barely been conscious of anything but his bitter and miserable disillusionment, his awakening from the dream that had become so real to him. She was still seated at the card-table, and with that need for trivial employment which so often accompanies emotional crises, she was building a house with the cards they had been using, devoting apparently her whole faculties to its breathless construction. The strong, beautiful hands which Archie had never noticed hovered over it, alighting with their building materials, putting each card delicately and firmly in place, and her grave face watched the ascending stories, as if Babylon the Great was rising again for the marvel of mankind. Then Helena sat down by her, and, leaning her arm on the table, caused a vibration that demolished Babylon from garret to cellar.

"Oh, Jessie, I'm so sorry," she said, and she was; the fall of an ingenious card-house was the sort of thing that provoked her pity.

Jessie swept the cards together and seemed about to get up.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "It is bed-time, isn't it?"

Helena put her head wistfully on one side.

"Aren't you being horribly unkind to me?" she said. She did not suppose it was much use playing on the pathetic stop, that made, as a general rule, so insincere a bleating in her sister's ears, but it was worth trying.

"I don't think there is any use in talking, Helena," she said. "If I am unkind, if I can't bear what you have done, it is because I simply can't help it."

Helena fingered the debris of the card-house with those more delicate fingers that could caress and claw so exquisitely. Essentially, she cared not one atom what Jessie thought of her, but she wanted not to be uncomfortable for the next few weeks.

"Ah, that is it?" she added. "You are satisfied to hate and detest me because you can't help it. That seems to you a final and unanswerable excuse. But n.o.body else may do anything because she can't help it."

"But you could have helped what you have done," said Jessie. "You made Archie think you cared for him. You let him fall in love with you on that a.s.sumption."

"He let himself fall in love with me," said Helena. "That was not my fault. Besides..."

She was silent a moment, weaving delicate spider-threads in her mind.

She really wanted to propitiate Jessie just now, otherwise she would certainly have reminded her that she, anyhow, had allowed herself to fall in love with Archie, though she would not say that that was Archie's fault. It would have been amusing to suggest that, but it did not seem to tend towards reconciliation. She bent her graceful head a little lower over the fallen card-house. It had collapsed with tragic suddenness, even as Archie had collapsed.

"Besides," she went on, "it was open to Archie to propose to me. He did not. We were several weeks together at Silorno. And then I came to London and met Bertie. Was it my fault that I fell in love with him? I think you are horribly unkind to me."

Jessie came a step nearer.

"Are you in love with him?" she asked. "If you tell me you are in love with him..."

"Do you think I should marry him if I was not?" asked Helena, looking the picture of limpid, childlike innocence.