The Convert Part 78

'That aspect of the question has become irrelevant so far as I'm personally concerned,' said Vida, exasperated by Lady John's look of pleased significance. 'I've got to a place where I realize that the first battles of this new campaign must be fought by women alone. The only effective help men could give--amendment of the law--they refuse.

The rest is nothing.'

'Don't be ungrateful, Vida. Here is this gentleman ready to face criticism in publicly championing you----'

'Yes, but it's an illusion that I, as an individual, need a champion. I am quite safe in the crowd. Please don't wait for me and don't come for me again.'

The sensitive dark face flushed. 'Of course if you'd rather----'

'And that reminds me,' she went on, unfairly punishing poor Mr. Trent for Lady John's meaning looks, 'I was asked to thank you, and to tell you, too, that they won't need your chairmanship any more--though that, I beg you to believe, has nothing to do with any feeling of mine.'

He was hurt and he showed it. 'Of course I know there must be other men ready--better known men----'

'It isn't that. It's simply that we find a man can't keep a rowdy meeting in order as well as a woman.'

He stared.

'You aren't serious?' said Lady John.

'Haven't you noticed,' Miss Levering put it to Trent, 'that all our worst disturbances come when men are in charge?'

'Ha! ha! Well--a--I hadn't connected the two ideas.'

Still laughing a little ruefully, he suffered himself to be taken downstairs by kind little Miss Dunbarton, who had stood without a word waiting there with absent face.

'That nice boy's in love with you,' said Lady John, _sotto voce_.

Vida looked at her without answering.

'Good-bye.' They shook hands. 'I _wish_ you hadn't been so unkind to that nice boy.'

'Do you?'

'Yes; for then I would be more sure of your telling Geoffrey Stonor that intelligent women don't nurse their wrongs indefinitely, and lie in wait to punish them.'

'You are _not_ sure?'

Lady John went up close and looked into her face with searching anxiety.

'Are _you_?' she asked.

Vida stood there mute, with eyes on the ground. Lady John glanced nervously at her watch, and, with a gesture of perturbation, hurriedly left the room. The other went slowly back to her place by the table.

The look she bent on Stonor as he came in seemed to take no account of those hurried glimpses at the Tunbridges' months before, and twice to-day when other eyes were watching. It was as if now, for the first time since they parted, he stood forth clearly. This man with the changed face, coming in at the door and carefully shutting it--he had once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day, beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened fastidiousness--mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple, and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is something in that cool, sure a.s.sumption of unapproachableness on the part of one who once had been so near--something that lames advance and hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the need of justifying their presence and defending their value.

As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the past grew plainer.

However ludicrous the result may look in the last a.n.a.lysis, it is clear that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any mere patent of n.o.bility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching to their graves.

But the shining superiority of the man seemed to be a little dimmed for the woman sitting there. The old face and the new face, she saw them both through a cloud of long-past memories and a mist of present tears.

'Well, have they primed you?' she said very low. 'Have you got your lesson--by heart at last?'

He looked at her from immeasurable distance. 'I am not sure that I understand you,' he said. He waited an instant, then, seeing no explanation vouchsafed, 'However unpropitious your mood may be,' he went on with a satirical edge in his tone, 'I shall discharge my errand.'

Still she waited.

Her silence seemed to irritate him. 'I have promised,' he said, with a formality that smacked of insolence, 'to offer you what I believe is called "amends."'

The quick change in the brooding look should have warned him.

'You have come to realize, then--after all these years--that you owed me something?'

He checked himself on the brink of protest. 'I am not here to deny it.'

'Pay, then,' she said fiercely--'pay.'

A moment's dread flickered in his eye and then was gone. 'I have said that, if you exact it, I will.'

'Ah! If I insist, you'll "make it all good"! Then, don't you know, you must pay me in kind?'

He looked down upon her--a long, long way. 'What do you mean?'

'Give me back what you took from me--my old faith,' she said, with shaking voice. 'Give me that.'

'Oh, if you mean to make phrases----' He half turned away, but the swift words overtook him.

'Or, give me back mere kindness--or even tolerance! Oh, I don't mean _your_ tolerance.' She was on her feet to meet his eyes as he faced her again. 'Give me back the power to think fairly of my brothers--not as mockers--thieves.'

'I have not mocked you. And I have asked you----'

'Something you knew I should refuse. Or'--her eyes blazed--'or did you dare to be afraid I wouldn't?'

'Oh, I suppose'--he b.u.t.tressed his good faith with bitterness--'I suppose if we set our teeth we could----'

'I couldn't--not even if I set my teeth. And you wouldn't dream of asking me if you thought there was the smallest chance.'

Ever so faintly he raised his heavy shoulders. 'I can do no more than make you an offer of such reparation as is in my power. If you don't accept it----' He turned away with an air of '_that's_ done.'

But her emotion had swept her out of her course. She found herself at his side.

'Accept it? No! Go away and live in debt. Pay and pay and pay--and find yourself still in debt--for a thing you'll never be able to give me back. And when you come to die'--her voice fell--'say to yourself, "I paid all my creditors but one."'

He stopped on his way to the door and faced her again. 'I'm rather tired, you know, of this talk of debt. If I hear that you persist in it, I shall have to----' Again he checked himself.

'What?'

'No. I'll keep to my resolution.'