Afterwards Part 17

She interrupted him without ceremony.

"I? But how should I realize ... unless"--suddenly her intuition serving her as it serves so many women, she grasped the truth with a quickness which surprised even her brother--"was that the name of the man who--you don't mean it was Dr. Anstice who ... who...."

He nodded.

"Yes. I see you've grasped the truth. Anstice is an uncommon name, and I'm surprised you did not recognize it earlier."

"I had forgotten it." She stared at him, her blue eyes narrowing as her mind worked quickly. "I see now. Dr. Anstice is the man----"

"Who shot Hilda Ryder." Cheniston finished her sentence for her calmly, but she saw him whiten beneath his tan. "Yes. He is the man all right.

We met, once, in Bombay--afterwards. And now you know why our meeting to-night was not calculated to give either of us any great pleasure."

"Yes. I know now." She spoke slowly, almost meditatively. "And I know, too, why he always looks so sad. Bruce, from the bottom of my heart I pity that man."

"You do?" Bruce's eyebrows rose. "I confess I don't see why you should waste your pity on him. I think you might bestow a little more of it on me--though it is rather late for pity now."

"On you?" Slowly her blue gaze rested on his face. "Bruce, you don't compare your position with his? Surely even you can understand that he is a thousand times more to be pitied than you? I always thought there was a tragedy in Dr. Anstice's life. But I never dreamed it was quite so piteous as this."

Bruce uttered an exclamation of impatience.

"I didn't expect such sentimentality from you, Chloe. I gathered from your conversation before dinner that you were pretty well disillusioned by this time, and it rather surprises me to hear you pouring out your compa.s.sion on a man like Anstice, who certainly doesn't strike me as requiring any outside sympathy."

For a moment there was silence, while Chloe played absently with a bracelet she had just discarded. Then she said tranquilly:

"You never were overburdened with brains, Bruce, though I grant you do well in your own profession. But, if you fail to see the reason why Dr.

Anstice is deserving of more compa.s.sion than you I'm afraid it's hopeless to expect anything very brilliant from you in the future."

Cheniston's eyes darkened and his jaw set itself aggressively. For a moment his sister found him an unfamiliar personality, and in her own indifferent way asked herself whether after all she had ever known her brother thoroughly.

Then as she was considering the problem, and finding it mildly attractive, Bruce turned on his heel and strode sulkily to the door.

"Good night," he said angrily as he reached it. "You're in one of your aggravating moods to-night, and it's no use me staying to talk to you."

"Not a bit of use," she a.s.sented serenely; and her brother went out, nearly falling over Tochatti, who was evidently about to seek admission to her mistress's room.

"Why on earth aren't you in bed, Tochatti?" His inward annoyance made him speak harshly; but Tochatti apparently bore no resentment.

She murmured something to which he paid scant attention; and then, standing aside for him to pa.s.s her, she quietly entered the room he had just quitted, and proceeded with her final duties for the night.

CHAPTER VII

For two or three weeks after his meeting with Mrs. Carstairs' brother, Anstice avoided both Cherry Orchard and Greengates.

From a chance word in the village he had learned that Bruce Cheniston was prolonging his visit to his sister; and that new and totally unreasoning jealousy which had a.s.sailed Anstice as he saw Cheniston bending over Iris Wayne at the piano told him with a horrid certainty that to the girl herself belonged the responsibility for this change in the young man's plans.

In his calmer moments Anstice could not help admitting the suitability of a friendship, at least, between the two. Although he had lost much of his attractive boyishness Cheniston was a good-looking fellow enough; and there was no denying the fact that he and Miss Wayne were a well-matched pair so far as youth and vitality and general good looks went; and yet Anstice could not visualize the pair together without a fierce, wild pang of jealousy which pierced his heart with an almost intolerable anguish.

For he wanted Iris Wayne for himself. He loved her; and therein lay tragedy; for he told himself miserably that he had no right to ask her to couple her radiant young life with his, already overshadowed by that past happening in India.

Not only that, but he was already over thirty, she but eighteen; and Sir Richard Wayne's daughter was only too well provided with this world's goods, while he, with all his training, all his toil, was even yet a comparatively poor man, with nothing to offer the girl in exchange for the luxurious home from which he would fain take her.

On every count he knew himself to be ineligible; and in the same flash of insight he saw Bruce Cheniston, young, good-looking, distinguished in his profession, in the receipt of a large salary; and owned to himself, with that clarity of vision which rarely failed him, that Cheniston, rather than he, was a fit suitor for Iris Wayne.

On several occasions during those weeks of May he saw the two together; and each time this happened he felt as though the sun had vanished from the sky, as though the soft breezes of early summer were turned to the cold and hopeless blast of an icy north-easter.

Cheniston had a motor-bicycle on which he intended to explore the district; and on finding a kindred spirit in Miss Wayne he had inaugurated a series of expeditions in which she was his companion; while Chloe Carstairs and Cherry would motor forth in the same direction and share a picnic lunch at some wayside hostelry--an arrangement which afforded unbounded pleasure to some members, at least, of the quartette.

That Cheniston was strongly attracted by Iris, Anstice did not doubt. On one unlucky Sunday he had received an invitation from Greengates, which, delivered as it was in person by Sir Richard himself, could not have been refused without discourtesy; and in the middle of the evening Cheniston had dropped in casually with a message from his sister, and had stayed on with an easy certainty of welcome which betokened a rapid growth in favour with both father and daughter.

What Iris' feelings towards the new-comer might be Anstice had no means of discovering. Her manner towards him was delightfully girlish and simple, and it was plain to see that she was fascinated by his accounts of life in the wonderful Egypt which holds always so strong an attraction for the romantic temperament; but with all her young _insouciance_ Iris Wayne was not one to wear her heart upon her sleeve; and her friendliness never lost that touch of reticence, of unconscious dignity which const.i.tuted, to Anstice, one of her greatest charms.

Towards himself, as an older man and one whose life naturally ran on contrasting lines, her manner was a little less a.s.sured, as though she were not quite certain of her right to treat him as one on a level with herself; but the tinge of girlish deference to which, as he guessed, his profession ent.i.tled him in her eyes, was now and then coloured with something else, with a hint of gentleness, not unlike compa.s.sion, which was oddly, dangerously sweet to his sore and lonely heart.

Somehow the idea of marriage had never previously entered his head.

Before the day which had, so to speak, cut his life in two, with a line of cleavage dividing the careless past from the ever-haunted future, he had been too busy, too much occupied in preparation for the brilliant career which he felt would one day be his, to allow thoughts of marriage to distract him from his chosen work. And since that fatal day, although his old enthusiasm, his old belief in himself and his capabilities, had long ago receded into the dim background, he had never consciously thought of any amelioration of the loneliness, the bitter, regretful solitude in which he now had his being.

Yet the thought of Iris Wayne was oddly, uncomfortably distracting; and in those weeks of May, during which he deliberately denied himself the sight of her, Anstice's face grew haggard, his eyes more sunken beneath their straight black brows.

Yet Fate ordained that he should meet her, more, do her service; and the meeting, with its subsequent conversation, was one which Iris at least was destined never to forget.

One grey and cloudy morning when the sun had forgotten to shine, and the air was warm and moist, Anstice was driving his car along a country road when he espied her sitting by the wayside with a rather woe-begone face.

Her motor-bicycle was beside her and she was engaged in tying a knot, with the fingers of her left hand aided by her teeth, in a roughly-improvised bandage which hid her right wrist.

On seeing his car she looked up; and something in the rather piteous expression of her grey eyes made him slow down beside her.

"What's wrong, Miss Wayne? Had a spill?"

She answered him ruefully.

"Yes. At least my motor skidded and landed me in the road. And I cut my wrist on a sharp stone--look!"

She held up a cruelly-jagged flint; and Anstice sprang out of his car and approached her.

"I say, what a horrid-looking thing! Let me see your wrist, may I? I think you'd better let me bind it up for you."

"Will you?" She held out her wrist obediently, and taking off the handkerchief which bound it he saw that it was really badly cut, the blood still dripping from the wound.

"Ah, quite a nasty gash--it would really do with a st.i.tch or two." He hesitated, looking at her thoughtfully. "Miss Wayne, what's to be done?

You can't ride home like that, and yet we can hardly leave your motor-bike on the roadside."

He paused a second, his wits at work. Then his face cleared.

"I know what we'll do," he said. "Round this corner is a cottage where a patient of mine lives. We'll go in there, dispatch her son to look after the bike till I patch you up, and then if you can't manage to ride home we'll think of some other arrangement."