Across the Stream Part 25

"Do you like her better than Miss Helena?" asked Archie.

Blessington nodded her head very emphatically.

"Not that I say she isn't a nice young lady, too," she said mysteriously.

"What's the matter with her then?" asked Archie.

Blessington looked the incarnation of discretion.

"I say nothing," she said. "But there's some as are artful, and some as are not. Now, my dear, you must go and see your mamma, or she'll be wondering where you are."

"I'm with my young woman," said Archie.

"There! Get along with you," said Blessington. "Eh, Master Archie, I love a talk over old times with you."

Archie went reluctantly away to greet his mother and Jessie, for these talks with Blessington had become to him a sort of oasis in this weary wilderness of scorching sand through which he had to travel all day and for many hours of the night. She was the comforter of the troubles of his earliest childhood; it was she who had always been by him if some nightmare s.n.a.t.c.hed him from sleep, or if the dark developed terrors, and that habit of calling on her for aid, established among the mists of dawning consciousness he found still alive as an instinct, when there came on him now the maturer woes of love and manhood. Throughout his school life and his three years at Cambridge, he had never quite let go of Blessington's hand, which had been the first to direct and sustain his tottering attempts at locomotion. Now, too, she was the only member of his immediate circle who did not know of his trouble, and it was an unutterable relief to feel that he was not being pitied and sympathized with by somebody. For, though there is nothing in the world better than sympathy and pity, no sufferer smarting from a recent wound wants to live exclusively in such surroundings. Pity and sympathy, though they heal, yet touch the wound, and he never got over the impression when he was with his mother, for instance, that his wound was being dressed...

Jessie did not force that on him so much, yet with her he was always being reminded of the fact that she was Helena's sister. But with Blessington he could go back into the sunlight of the past: talk with her, and another occupation, temporary, he told himself, to tide him over those days, enabled him to get away to some extent, from himself.

He met his mother in the hall, and instantly those anxious eyes of love, which, for all his affection for her, he found irritating, were on him.

She was at his wound again, taking off the bandages, seeing how it was getting on...

"And how are you, darling?" she said, looking at him with the tenderness that got on his nerves.

Archie kissed her.

"I am quite well, thanks," he said. "I have just been having a talk with Blessington."

"My dear, how she would like that!" said Lady Tintagel with eager cordiality. "That was thoughtful of you."

Archie jerked himself away from her: though his mother said nothing direct, he felt that pity filled her mind. He was in its presence, and longed to get away from it. All the time another distinct piece of his mind wanted to hear about Helena. But he could not ask any question about her.

"How are you, Archie?" said Jessie quietly.

Archie's exasperation suddenly flared up.

"I have just told my mother I am very well," he said. "I am still very well, thank you."

Jessie laughed; she managed better than Lady Tintagel.

"In that case, come and have a game of golf-croquet with me," she said.

"There's time before we need dress, isn't there? I do want some air so badly after town."

Archie glanced at the clock; he usually went to his father's study about this time, when they celebrated the approaching advent of dinner with a c.o.c.ktail or two. That was the beginning of the tolerable part of the day: there was plenty of wine at dinner, and afterwards a succession of whiskies and sodas, and to be alive became quite a bearable condition again. On that first evening when Helena had told him her news and paid her half-crowns he had found that alcohol broke down his sense of being stunned, of being made of wood. Now he drank for another reason: by drink he got rid of the misery of normal consciousness and emerged into some sort of life again. It stimulated his brain, he could by its means escape for a little from that one perpetual thought of Helena that went round in his head like a stick in a backwater, and get into the current again. Sometimes he would go to his room, taking a whisky and soda with him, and wrestle with the sea-sketches he had so enthusiastically worked at at Silorno. By degrees the liquid in his gla.s.s ebbed, and his pile of cigarette-ends mounted, and he would go back for fresh supplies. But, while these hours lasted, he lived, and what to-morrow should bring he did not in the least care. He could escape for a few hours now, and that was sufficient. Also, when he went to bed, he could sleep heavily and dreamlessly.

There was still time for a game with Jessie, before going in to his father; Jessie would take longer to dress for dinner than he, and there would be a few minutes to spare after she went upstairs. But, even as they were strolling across the lawn to get the croquet-b.a.l.l.s from their box, she a little ahead of him as he nursed a match for his cigarette, he looked up, and there in front of him might have been Helena. The two were of the same height and build, they moved like each other. It was Jessie, of course, but just for a second, while his match burned up in the hollow of his hand, it was not she at all...

He threw the match away.

"Get the b.a.l.l.s out, will you?" he said. "I've left my cigarette-case in my father's room."

He ran back to the house, and went in through the garden door of his father's study. Lord Tintagel was sitting in the big leather arm-chair, with his feet up on another, and a gla.s.s beside him.

"Just come for a c.o.c.ktail, father," said Archie. "Hullo, they're not here yet. It doesn't matter; I'll take a gla.s.s of whisky and soda."

"By all means; take what you like," said the other drowsily. "You mother's come, hasn't she?"

"Yes, mother and Jessie," said Archie, pouring himself out some whisky.

The soda-water was nearly exhausted, but the dregs of it gurgled pleasantly over the spirit. He drank it in a couple of gulps.

"What are you going to do now?" asked his father.

"Only have a game with Jessie."

"All right. Call in here when it's time to go up and dress. There'll be a c.o.c.ktail for you then. Infernal lazy fellows the servants are not to bring them in earlier. Chuck me over the evening paper, will you?"

The evening remission from deadness and dulness and misery had begun for Archie. He played his game with Jessie, drank his c.o.c.ktail, and by the end of dinner had risen to such naturalness of good spirits again, that his mother commended herself for the wisdom of her plan that he should leave London and seek a change of mind in a change of scene. He had done some writing since he had been here; he seemed pleased with the way it was going, and she talked hopefully to Jessie when they held a rather protracted sitting in the drawing-room before the two men joined them.

Perhaps they had both overrated the strength of Archie's attachment: certainly to-night he did not appear like a boy who had so lately suffered an overwhelming disappointment in his affections.

"And Blessington says he has been just as delightful and affectionate to her as usual," said Lady Tintagel. "He goes and talks to her every evening as he always did. I think you must have been wrong, dear Jessie, when you thought he was so mortally hurt."

Jessie did not reply at once: she felt sure that she, with the insight of that love which is more comprehending than any mother's love, was somehow right about that point. It was not the mere lapse of a week that had restored Archie. Besides, Blessington did not know about his troubles. She could easily conjecture what a relief he might find in that. She knew that she would feel the same in his place; she could understand how much easier it was to behave normally with those who did not know than with those who did. Yet Archie's father knew, and all through dinner she had seen how friendly and intimate the two had become. Archie used to be constrained and awkward with his father, while his father used to be rather contemptuous of him. But this evening there had been none of that on either side, and now they lingered together a long time over their talk and their cigarettes. It was as if some bond of sympathy was springing up between them. But she shrank from admitting the explanation to herself: it might be that a man, who had been so bitterly disappointed about a girl, found something in another man that suited his mood. Women would remind him of a woman...

There was a shout of laughter in the hall outside, and Archie came in, followed by his father. He did not communicate the grounds for his merriment, but, looking a little flushed, very handsome, and very content, sat down on the sofa by his mother.

"Well, mother darling?" he said.

Instantly her love yearned forth to him.

"My dear, it is good to hear you laugh," she said. "What have you and your father been talking about?"

The sense of being watched, the love that irritated did not trouble Archie now. The sunny hours would stretch unclouded until he fell into bed. He laughed again, looking across to his father.

"I say, father," he said, "shall I tell her, or would she think it not quite...?"

"Just as you like," said Lord Tintagel.

The door into the garden, already ajar, swung gently open, admitting a breath of cool night-air into the room. It stirred in Jessie's hair as it pa.s.sed her, and moved across to Archie, making the flowers in a vase near him vibrate. And for just that moment some impulse from the untainted tranquillity stirred in his soul, and his overheated, stimulated brain drank it thirstily in. His own laughter, and the subject of his laughter, the whole contents of the last hour or two, seemed stale and stuffy. The air of them was thick with the fumes of wine, with the fancies and images that it evoked, smoke-wreaths that hung heavy in the atmosphere, swirling and turning like dancers and melting into other shapes. But for that moment when the night-air came in from the crystal-clear dusk outside, that liquid tabernacle of sapphire in the holy night, where stars sang together and nightingales burned, the hot fumes dispersed, and he drew in long, tranquillizing breaths. This physical impression had, too, its psychical counterpart, for even as the air that stirred in Jessie's hair brought a coolness and a refreshment to him, so from the girl herself there seemed to stream into it a current of something wholesome and human and unfevered, unvexed by desire, and untouched by bitterness...

"It's rather hot in here," he said. "Will you come for a stroll, Jessie?"

They went out together... The heavens were full of stars, and a slip of a moon was near to its setting. Over the beds below the windows there hovered the fainter fragrance of sleeping flowers that stood with hanging heads and leaves that glimmered with the falling dew. Beyond lay the dimmed mirror of the lake, and beside it rose the dark ma.s.s of the wood in which the nightingales were singing. The scene seemed prepared for some human love-duet, when lovers fancy that nature is arranging her most sensuous effects for their benefit, though in reality she is but pursuing the path ordained for her by the wheeling seasons, and predicted by barometers and apparatus that is concerned only with heat and movements of the moon. And, of lovers, there was one of each pair absent, as the two walked quietly towards the wood of the nightingales; for Jessie there was no eager mate, and for Archie none... Two hungry souls, both longing, both unsatisfied, went forth on that twilit pilgrimage. Spring still stirred in them, and there burned above them the everlasting choir of the stars. But that helped in no way: had they been lovers, an autumn squall or a winter snow-storm would have served their purpose just as well.

Archie chattered for a little while, comparing the moon to a clipped finger-nail, the dimmed mirror of the lake to a frozen rink in Switzerland, with all the hollowness of superficial talk, when the tongue speaks from habit, which is as lightly rooted as the seed on stony ground. Heart-whole, he had often chattered like that, and Jessie had sunned herself and responded to those silly things; but now she knew, as well as he, that the babble was no more than blown sea-foam. It made her heart ache that he should talk it to her, for, though she made no claim on his love, it was miserable that he could not recognize how true a friend it was who was by his side in this song-haunted darkness.

She knew--none better--that he had no love to give her, but her love that was so disciplined to go hungry without crying out, starved for a word from him that should fly the flag of friendship, n.o.blest of all ensigns that are not of royal emblazonment.

They had come to the edge of the lake, and a moor-hen steered its water-logged flight across the surface. And then Archie's foolish chatter died, and he was silent as he watched the rayed ripple of water.

The wash died away in the reeds, and chuckled on the bank, and at last he spoke.