Paddy The Next Best Thing Part 51

Paddy stared at the loch and remained silent.

"Patricia the Great at the head of an avenging army--leading on fools and knights-errant--devastating a peaceful, harmless land for the sake of a Dream--a Prejudice--a Chimera. I see it all."

She looked helplessly unhappy, but he would not spare her.

"Listen to me, Patricia the Great. You shall keep your feud, and cling to your prejudice a little longer, but _I will not give in_. I want you. That at least is a plain, ungarnished truth. Perhaps if you knew me as well as some, you would realise that it is the sort of truth I have a little habit of making into a fact, in spite of dreams and prejudices. This thing has got to be, Paddy. I repeat what I said before. If I am worth my name, I will win you yet."

"Ah, why will you talk like this, when it is so useless," she cried.

"Why will you not be friends? Lawrence, let us be friends. Let me thank you for the other night, and, for the sake of it, drop the old feud. I will try to do this to show you I am sincere in my grat.i.tude."

His face grew suddenly whiter than ever with concentrated pa.s.sion and determination. "We will do nothing of the kind. I don't want your friendship. You can take it back. Do you hear? I refuse your kindly pat on the shoulder, and your offer to be a good girl because you think you owe me thanks. You can keep your feud and your hatred--anything is better than a soppy middle course. It is my turn now, and I refuse your offer of sisterly affection, which is what it amounts to. I will have your love some day, but until then, your hate, please. As long as you go on hating I shall know at least that you are not indifferent, and that the sound of my name does not pa.s.s unheeded by your ears. And we will continue to cross swords--we will be as we were before. If you want to show this grat.i.tude you talk of, show it that way; it is the only thing I ask of you."

She shrank from him a little bewildered. The strength of his pa.s.sion stirred every fibre of her being, and the thought crossed her--would she be able to withstand him for long? But Lawrence cooled suddenly. He had said his say; for the present, there was nothing further to be gained. In two minutes his face was almost as impa.s.sive as of old, as he remarked cynically:

"Trust an old fool for being a big fool. I am ranting like a street preacher. Well, I will go home and find my level again. Good-by, Paddy." He gripped her hand with such force that she uttered a little cry.

"There, I didn't mean to hurt you, only to show you how I can grip, if I make up my mind to anything. Remember I am your enemy. Go on hating as hard as you like, until I make you love. We shall meet again soon in London."

Then he strode off through the wood, and left her by the loch alone.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.

GWEN'S VIEWS ON MATRIMONY.

When Paddy got back to London, her mother, and Eileen, and the doctor, and even Basil thought she was changed in some way, but they did not know how. She was quieter than she used to be, or at any rate given to moods, bursting out now and then into unusual spirits which had yet a ring of not being perfectly genuine.

Curiously enough, perhaps, Gwendoline Carew was the only one who actually knew what was affecting her. She had met Lawrence in the autumn at a shooting party at a mutual friend's, and quickly recognised some change in him too. Of course she had taken the first opportunity to tax him with it, and absolutely refused to be put off with cynicism or scoffing or anything else.

"Don't waste time talking to me like this, Lawrie," she had said, "as if I didn't know you too well by this time. Just have the grace to bow your superior old head for once, and own you've reached a fence you can't clear."

"Wouldn't it be better to make sure first? I wouldn't for the world tell you an untruth."

"I'll risk it. Besides, Lawrie, who knows! I might be able to help."

"I have rather a weakness for managing my own affairs."

"I know you have, and on the whole they do you credit, but it seems to me there's something on foot now, that you're just not quite so dead certain sure about as usual."

Lawrence was silent.

"Once before it was the same," said Gwen. "Don't you remember when a certain father died, and you were in doubt? Well, didn't Gwen manage you then and help to keep you from running off the track!"

"I am not in doubt now," he answered.

"No, but I strongly suspect that you are in love."

He only looked steadily before him and made no sign.

"If it's Paddy," said candid Gwen, "I'll just move heaven and earth to help you. If it isn't you can 'gang yer ain gait.'"

She waited, and presently Lawrence said quietly: "It is Paddy."

Whereupon Gwen forgot she was a young personage of importance mentioned often in the fashionable papers, and danced a little jig all round the room.

"Lovely!" she cried, "just lovely! You must get married before me so that I can be a bridesmaid, Lawrie."

"You are somewhat premature," dryly. "Paddy has refused to marry me."

Gwen came to a sudden standstill.

"Refused," she repeated, as if she were not quite sure she had heard aright.

"Yes, plain, ungarnished, unmistakable refusal."

"Little idiot!" said Gwen, "what's she dreaming of!"

"I don't know, but she was at considerable pains to impress upon me that even medicine bottles and that beastly dispensary were preferable to Mourne Lodge with me."

Gwen made a curious whistling sound with her lips--again not in the least what one would expect from a young lady mentioned in fashionable papers, and sat down beside Lawrence looking quite subdued.

"Well, don't look so blue," she said presently. "Where there's a will there's a way. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to win."

"That's right. Never say die. I expect you've taken her rather too much by surprise. I'm quite sure when I last saw Paddy, it had never entered her head for a moment that you cared a fig about her except to tease. Give her time to come round a bit. It sounds like playing a salmon, doesn't it? I'm sure it will be heaps more interesting than if she'd said 'yes' right away, and you'll both care more in the end.

That's what I tell Bob sometimes. I was much too easily won, and I want to go back and begin again, I just dropped right off the tree into his hands like an over-ripe cherry. Disgusting to think of--isn't it? I ought to have let him mope and pine a bit, and pretended I didn't care.

Only I'd have been so horribly afraid he thought I meant it, and gone off, or something. I guess that sort of thing is all very fine to talk about and in story books, but when it comes to pretending you don't like a man, when you're just dying to have him all for your own--why it isn't human nature. Them's my sentiments!"

Lawrence could not help smiling, but it was poor enough comfort for him, though before they separated Gwen did really cheer him a little by her determined hopefulness and sanguinity.

With Paddy, however, she did not get on in the matter quite so well as she had expected. At the very first allusion Paddy simply drew back into herself, and refused to be coaxed or cajoled into uttering a single word. Gwen tried several times and then had to give in.

"Oh, well, if you won't, you won't," she said. "I always thought I took the biscuit for pure, downright obstinacy, but I hand it on to you now."

Lawrence himself did not come to London until the end of October, having decided it was best not to be in too great a hurry, and he had better have a turn at the pheasants first. When he came he stayed with the Grant-Carews, and it was here he met Paddy through a little subterfuge of Gwen's.

"My poppa and momma," she wrote to Paddy, "are going to a terrible, overpowering, grand-turk, political luncheon party, to which flighty young persons like myself are not admitted, but have to remain at home alone and bear the weight of the distinction of belonging to some one who has been admitted. Do be a dear girl and come and bear the weight with me. With your company and a liberal supply of De Brei's chocolates I antic.i.p.ate getting through the afternoon all right. In case of accidents, however, I may just mention the fact of our loneliness to one of His Majesty's Horse Guards, but you will have no occasion to be uneasy anyway--_Comprenez_?"

Paddy accepted the invitation, but as Gwen fluttered across the drawing-room to receive her, her quick eyes instantly descried in the far window the back of a well-cut masculine coat, that was somehow familiar.

"Who is here?" she asked at once.

"Only Lawrence," said Gwen, in the most casual fashion. "He is staying with us. Didn't I tell you?"

Paddy made no reply. The plot was too apparent, but this very fact put her on her mettle, and helped her more than anything else would have done.

"How do you do?" she said to him, trying to seem perfectly at ease. "I thought you were shooting pheasants in Suffolk."

"So I was until both they and the shooting grew too tame."