Afterwards Part 20

Sir Richard, for all his years, was hale and hearty and loved a game of tennis; so that when once Iris' wrist was healed there were many keenly contested games during the long, light evenings--games in which Iris, partnered either by Cheniston or Anstice, darted about the court like a young Diana in her short white skirt and blouse open at the neck to display the firm, round throat which was one of her greatest charms.

The antagonism between Anstice and Bruce Cheniston deepened steadily during these golden summer days. Had they met in different circ.u.mstances, had there been no question, however vague and undefined, of rivalry between them, it is possible there would have been no positive hostility in their mutual att.i.tude. Any genuine friendship was naturally debarred, seeing the nature of the memory they shared in common; but it would have been conceivably possible for them to have met and recognized one another's existence with a neutrality which would have covered a real but harmless distaste for each other's society.

Having been forced, by an unkind Fate, into a position in which each saw in the other a possible rival, any neutrality was out of the question.

It had not taken Anstice long to discover that Cheniston had so far recovered from the loss of Hilda Ryder as to consider the possibility of making another woman his wife; nor had Cheniston's eyes been less keen.

He had very quickly discovered that Anstice was in love with pretty Iris; and instantly a fire of opposition sprang into fierce flame in his heart; and to himself he said that this man, having once deprived him of his chosen woman, should not again be permitted to come between him and his desire.

True, he did not profess to love Iris Wayne as he had loved Hilda Ryder; for no other woman in the world could ever fill the place in his life left vacant by that untimely shot in the dawn of an Indian day.

Until the hour in which he learned of Miss Ryder's tragic death Bruce Cheniston had been an ordinary easy-going youth, cleverer in some ways than the average man, on a level with most as regarded his outlook on life and its possibilities. He had never been very deeply moved over anything. Things had always gone smoothly with him, and he had pa.s.sed through school and college with quite pa.s.sable success and complete satisfaction in himself and his surroundings. His love for Hilda Ryder was the best and highest thing in his whole life; and in his attempt to become what she believed him to be he rose to a higher mental and moral stature than he had ever before attained.

And then had come the tragedy which had deprived him at once of the girl he had loved and the incentive to a better, worthier manhood which her love had supplied. For her sake he could have done much, could have vanquished all the petty failings, the selfish weaknesses which marred his not otherwise unattractive character; but when Hilda Ryder vanished from his life he lost something which he never regained.

He grew older, harder, more cynical. His sunny boyishness, which had effectually masked the cold determination beneath, dropped from him as a discarded garment; and the real man, the man whose possibilities Hilda Ryder had dimly presaged and had resolved to conquer, came to the surface.

He felt, perhaps naturally, that he had a grudge against Fate; and the immediate result was to eliminate all softness from his character, and replace such amiable weakness by a harsh determination to shape his life henceforth to his own design, if indeed strength of purpose and a relentless lack of consideration for any other living being could compa.s.s such an end.

Fate had beaten him once. He was determined such victory should be final; and during the last few years Bruce Cheniston had been known as a man who invariably achieved his object in whatever direction such achievement lay--a man of whom his friends prophesied that he would surely go far; while his enemies, a small number, certainly, for on the whole he was popular, labelled him ruthless in the pursuit of his particular aims.

Perhaps he was not to blame for the metamorphosis which followed Hilda Ryder's death. For the first time he had loved a human being better than himself; so that the reaction which fell upon his spirit when he realized that his love was no longer needed was in its very nature severe.

Never again would he rise to the height of greatness to which his love for Hilda Ryder had raised him; and whatever the quality of any affection he might in future bestow upon a woman, the spark of immortality, of selflessness, which had undoubtedly inspired his first and truest love, would never again be kindled in his heart.

Yet in his way Bruce was attracted to Iris Wayne. On their last meeting she had been a little schoolgirl, a pretty creature, certainly, but not to be compared with the beautiful and gracious Hilda, to whom he was newly betrothed. Yet now, on meeting her again, he was bound to confess that Iris was wonderfully attractive; and in a strangely short period of time he came, by imperceptible degrees, to look upon her as a possible successor to the woman he had lost.

The fact that Anstice too found her desirable was stimulating. One of Cheniston's newly-acquired characteristics was a tendency to covet any object on which another had set his heart; and although in matters of business this trait was possibly excusable enough, in this instance it seemed likely to prove fatal to Anstice's happiness.

Which of the two men Iris herself preferred it would have taken a magician to understand.

With Bruce she was always her gayest self, plying him with eager questions concerning his life in Egypt; and she was quite evidently flattered by the pains he took to charm and interest her with his picturesque narratives of experiences in the land of the Nile. He was, moreover, at her service at all times, always ready to take her motor-cycling, or to play tennis or golf with her; and although Iris was as free from vanity as any girl could possibly be, it was not unpleasing to her youthful self-esteem to find a man like Cheniston over ready at her beck and call.

With Anstice she was quieter, shyer, more serious; yet Sir Richard, who watched the trio, as it were from afar, had a suspicion sometimes that the Iris whom Anstice knew was a more real, more genuine person than the gay and frivolous girl who laughed through the sunny hours with the younger man.

So the days pa.s.sed on; and if Anstice was once more living in a fools'

Paradise, this time the key which unlocked the Gate of Dreams was made of purest gold.

In the middle of July Iris was to celebrate the eighteenth anniversary of her birth; and rather to Anstice's dismay he found that the event was to be marked by a large and festive merry-making--nothing less, in fact, than a dinner-party, followed by a dance to be held in the rarely-used ballroom for which Greengates had been once famous.

"You'll come, of course, Dr. Anstice?" Iris asked the question one sunny afternoon as she prepared an iced drink for her visitor, after a strenuous game of tennis. "You do dance, don't you? For my part I could dance for ever."

"I do dance, yes," he said, taking the tumbler she held out to him, with a word of thanks. "But I don't think a ball is exactly in my line nowadays."

"It's not a ball," she said gaily. "Aunt Laura doesn't approve of oven a dance, seeing I'm not really 'out' till I've been presented next year--but Dad has been a perfect dear and says we can dance as long as we like down here where none of our London relations can see us!"

"Well, dance or ball, I suppose it will be a large affair?" He smiled at her, and she told herself that he grew younger every day.

"About a hundred and fifty, I suppose," she said lightly. "The room holds two hundred, but a crowded room is hateful--though an empty one would be almost worse. Anyhow, you are invited, first of all. Dinner is at seven, because we want to start dancing at nine. Will you come?"

Just for a second he hesitated. Then:

"Of course I'll come," he said recklessly. "But you must promise me at least three dances, or I shall plead an urgent telephone call and fly in the middle!"

"Three!" Her grey eyes laughed into his. "That's rather greedy!

Well--I'll give you two, and--perhaps--an extra."

"That's a promise," he said, and taking out a small notebook he made an entry therein. "And now, in view of coming frivolities, I must go and continue my day's work."

He rose and looked round the lovely old garden rather regretfully.

"How lucky you are to be able to spend the summer days in such a cool, shady spot as this! I wish you could see some of the stuffy cottages I go into round here--windows hermetically sealed, and even the fireplaces, when there are any, blocked up!"

She looked at him rather strangely.

"Do you know. Dr. Anstice," she said, irrelevantly, it seemed, "I don't believe you ought to be a doctor. Oh, I don't mean you aren't very clever--and kind--but somehow I don't believe you were meant to spend your days going in and out of stuffy cottages and attending to little village children with measles and whooping-cough!"

"Don't you?" Anstice leaned against the trunk of the big cedar under which she sat, and apparently forgot the need for haste. "To tell you the truth I sometimes wonder to find myself here. When I was younger, you know, I never intended to go in for general practice. I had dreams, wild dreams of specializing. I was ambitious, and intended making some marvellous discovery which should revolutionize medical science...."

He broke off abruptly, and when he spoke again his voice held the old bitter note which she had not heard of late.

"Well, that's all over. I lost ambition when I lost everything else, and now I suppose I shall go on to the end of the chapter as a general pract.i.tioner, attending old women in stuffy cottages, and children with measles and whooping-cough!"

He laughed; but Iris' face was grave.

"But, Dr. Anstice"--she spoke rather slowly--"isn't it possible for you to go back to those dreams and ambitions? Suppose you were to start again--to try once more to make the discovery you speak of.

Mightn't it ..." her voice faltered a moment, but her grey eyes were steady, "... mightn't that be the way out--for you?"

There was a sudden silence, broken only by the cooing of a wood-pigeon in a tall tree close at hand. Then Anstice said thoughtfully:

"I wonder? Supposing that were the way out, after all?"

Ha gazed at her with a long and steady gaze which was yet oddly impersonal, and she met his eyes bravely, though the carnation flush deepened in her cheeks. Just as she opened her lips to reply a new voice broke upon their ears.

"Good afternoon, Iris. Am I too late for a game of tennis?"

Bruce Cheniston, racquet in hand, had come round the corner of the shrubbery, and as she heard his voice Iris turned to him swiftly.

"Oh, good afternoon! You are late, aren't you? We waited for you ever so long, then as you did not come Dr. Anstice and I played a single."

"Oh." He looked rather curiously at the other man. "Which was the victor? You?"

"Oh, Dr. Anstice always beats me!" Iris laughed. "You and I are more evenly matched, Bruce--though I confess you generally win."

"Well, come and have a sett before the light goes." He glanced again at Anstice. "Unless Anstice is giving you your revenge?"