Afterwards Part 23

"It's Iris' birthday, isn't it, Bruce?" Cherry flatly refused to endow her uncle with the t.i.tle which rightly belonged to him. "What are you going to give her?"

"Give her? Well, come round here, and you shall see."

Nothing loth, Cherry obeyed, and stood beside him attentively while he opened a small leather case and took out a pair of earrings each consisting of a tiny, pear-shaped moonstone dangling at the end of a thin platinum chain.

"Earrings! But Iris hasn't any holes in her ears, my dear!" Cherry's consternation was genuine.

"I know that, you little goose! But these don't want holes--see, you screw them on like this."

He took one of her little pink ears in his fingers and screwed on the earring deftly.

"There, run and look at yourself," he commanded, and she trotted away to an oval gla.s.s which hung on the wall between the long windows. As she moved, Cheniston pa.s.sed the remaining earring to his sister.

"What do you say, Chloe--is it a suitable present for her ladyship!"

Chloe took up the little trinket with a rather dubious air.

"Somehow I don't think I can fancy Iris wearing earrings," she said; and Bruce, who had a respect for his sister's opinion which she herself did not suspect, looked rueful.

"But, Chloe, why not? You always wear them?"

"Certainly I do." As a matter of fact she did, and the pearls or sapphires which she affected were as much a part of her personality as her black hair or her narrow blue eyes. "But then Iris is a different sort of person. She is younger, more natural, more unsophisticated; and I'm not quite sure whether these pretty things will suit her charming face."

"Oh!" Bruce's own face fell, and for once Chloe felt an impulse of compa.s.sion with another's disappointment.

"At any rate they are very dainty and girlish," she said, handing back the case. "I congratulate you on your taste, Bruce. You might very easily have got more elaborate ones--like some of mine--which would have been very inappropriate to a girl."

"Why do you always speak of yourself as though you were a middle-aged woman, Chloe?" asked her brother with a sudden curiosity. "You seem to forget you are younger than I--why, you are only twenty-six now."

"Am I?" Her smile was baffling. "In actual years I believe I am. But in thought, in feeling, in everything, I am a hundred years older than you, Bruce."

Cherry's return to her uncle's side with a request to him to take out "the dangly thing what tickles my ear" cut short Bruce's reply, and breakfast proceeded tranquilly, while the sun shone gaily and the roses for which Cherry Orchard was famous scented the soft, warm air which floated in through the widely-opened windows.

Meanwhile Anstice was in a quandary on this beautiful summer morning.

Before he had pledged his word to Cheniston to stand aside and leave the field open to his rival, he had gladly accepted Iris' invitation to her birthday dinner and dance; but the thought of the dances she had promised him had changed from a source of antic.i.p.atory delight to one of the sheerest torment.

It had not been easy to avoid her. There had been hours in which he had had to restrain himself by every means in his power from rushing over to Greengates to implore her pardon for his discourtesy, and to beg her to receive him back into her most desirable favour. It had cost him an effort whose magnitude had left him cold and sick to greet her distantly on the rare occasions of their meeting; and many times he had been ready to throw his promise to the winds, to repudiate the horrible bargain he had struck, and to tell her plainly in so many words that he loved her and wanted her for his wife.

But he never yielded to the temptation. He had pledged his word, and somehow the thought that he was paying the price, now, for Hilda Ryder's untimely death, brought, ever and again, a fleeting sense of comfort as though the sacrifice of his own chance of happiness was an offering laid at her feet in expiation of the wrong he had all unwittingly wrought her.

But his heart sank at the idea of facing Iris once more, and the thought of her as she would surely be, the centre and queen of all the evening's gaiety, was almost unendurable.

At times he told himself that he could not go to Greengates that night.

He was only human, and the sight of her, dressed, as she would surely be, in some shimmering airy thing which would enhance all her beauty, would break down his steadfast resolve. He could not be with her in the warm summer night, hold her in his arms in the dance, while the music of the violins throbbed in his ears, the perfume of a thousand roses intoxicated all his senses, and not cry out his love, implore her to be kind as she was fair, to readmit him to her friendship, and grant him, presently, the privileges of a lover....

And then, in the next moment he told himself he could not bear to miss the meeting with her. He must go, must see her once more, see the wide grey eyes beneath their crown of sunny hair, hear her sweet, kind voice, touch her hand....

And then yet another thought beset him. What guarantee had he that Iris Wayne would welcome him to her birthday feast? He had thrown her kindness back into her face, had first accepted and then carelessly repudiated her friendship; and it was only too probable she had written him down as a casual and discourteous trifler with whom, in future, she desired to hold no intercourse.

The sunshiny day which the rest of the world found so beautiful was one long torment to Anstice. Restless, undecided, unhappy, he went about his work with set lips and a haggard face, and those of his patients who had lately found him improved to a new and attractive sociability revised their later impressions of him in favour of their first and less pleasing ones.

At five o'clock, acting on sudden impulse, he rang up Greengates and asked for Miss Wayne.

After a short delay she came, and as he heard her soft voice over the wire Anstice's face grew grim with controlled emotion.

"Is that you, Dr. Anstice?"

"Yes, Miss Wayne. I wanted to say--but first, may I wish you--many happy returns of your birthday?"

"Thanks very much." Straining his ears to catch every inflection in her voice, Anstice thought he detected a note of coldness. "By the way, were those beautiful sweet-peas from you--the ones that came at twelve o'clock to-day?"

"I sent them, yes." So much, at least, he had permitted himself to do.

"They were lovely--thank you so much for them." Iris spoke with a trifle more warmth, and for a moment Anstice faltered in his purpose. "You are coming to dinner presently, aren't you? Seven o'clock, because of the dance."

"Miss Wayne, I'm sorry ..." the lie almost choked him, but he hurried on, "... I can't get over to Greengates in time for dinner. I--I have a call--into the country--and can't get back before eight or nine."

"Oh!" For a moment Iris was silent, and to the man at the other end of the wire it seemed an eternity before she spoke again. Then: "I'm sorry," said Iris gently. "But you will come to the dance afterwards?"

For a second Anstice wavered. It would be wiser to refuse, to allege uncertainty, at least, to leave himself a loophole of escape did he find it impossible to trust himself sufficiently to go. He opened his lips to tell her he feared it might be difficult to get away, to prepare her for his probable absence; and then:

"Of course I will come to the dance," he said steadily. "I would not miss it for anything in the world!"

And he rang off hastily, fearing what he might be tempted to say if the conversation were allowed to continue another moment.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Anstice entered the hall of Greengates that night; and by that time dancing was in full swing.

By an irony of Fate he had been called out when just on the point of starting, and had obeyed the summons reluctantly enough.

The fact that his importunate patient was a tiny girl who was gasping her baby life away in convulsions changed his reluctance into an energetic desire to save the pretty little creature's life at any cost; but all his skill was of no avail, and an hour after he entered the house the child died.

Even then he could not find it in his heart to hurry away. The baby's parents, who were young and sociable people, had been, like himself, invited to the dance at Greengates--had, indeed, been ready to start when the child was taken ill; and the contrast between the young mother's frantic grief and her glittering ball-gown and jewels struck Anstice as an almost unendurable irony.

When at last he was able to leave the stricken house, having done all in his power to lighten the horror of the dreary hour, he was in no mood for gaiety, and for a few moments he meditated sending a message to say he was, after all, unable to be present at the dance.

Then the vision of Iris rose again before his eyes, and immediately everything else faded from his world, and he hastened to Greengates, arriving just as the clock struck eleven.

He saw her the moment he entered the room after greeting Sir Richard and Lady Laura in the hall. She was dancing with Cheniston, and Anstice had never seen her look more radiant.

She was wearing the very shimmering white frock in which he had pictured her, a filmy chiffon thing which set off her youthful beauty to its highest perfection; and the pearls which lay on her milky throat, the satin slippers which cased her slender feet, the bunch of lilies-of-the valley at her breast, were details in so charming a picture that others besides Anstice found her distractingly pretty to-night.

And as he noted her happy look, the air of serene content with which she yielded her slim form to her partner's guidance, the light in the grey eyes which smiled into Cheniston's face, Anstice's heart gave one bitter throb and then lay heavy as a stone in his breast.

He hardly doubted that she was won already; and in Cheniston's proud and a.s.sured bearing he thought he read the story of that winning.