The Return of the Prodigal Part 27

He tried to look as if he hadn't been to see Furnival off at the station, as if the beauty of the morning sufficiently accounted for his appearance at that early hour. The hour, indeed, was so disgustingly early that he would have half an hour to put through with Philippa before breakfast.

But Miss Tarrant ignored the beauty of the morning.

"What have you done," she said, "with Mr. Furnival?"

It was Straker who was disconcerted now.

"What have I done with him?"

"Yes. Where is he?"

Straker's tact was at a disadvantage, but his delicacy instantly suggested that if Miss Tarrant was not disconcerted it was because she didn't know he knew. That made it all right.

"He's in the seven-fifty train."

A light leaped in her eyes; the light of defiance and pursuit, the light of the hunter's l.u.s.t frustrated and of the hunter's ire.

"You must get him back again," she said.

"I can't," said Straker. "He's gone on business." (He still used tact with her.) "He had to go."

"He hadn't," said she. "That's all rubbish."

Her tone trod his scruples down and trampled on them, and Straker felt that tact and delicacy required of him no more. She had given herself away at last; she had let herself in for the whole calamity of his knowledge, and he didn't know how she proposed to get out of it this time. And he wasn't going to help her. Not he!

They faced each other as they stood there in the narrow walk, and his knowledge challenged her dumbly for a moment. Then he spoke.

"Look here, what do you want him for? Why can't you let the poor chap alone?"

"What do you suppose I want him for?"

"I've no business to suppose anything. I don't know. But I'm not going to get him back for you."

Something flitted across her face and shifted the wide gaze of her eyes. Straker went on without remorse.

"You know perfectly well the state he's in, and you know how he got into it."

"Yes. And I know," she said, "what you think of me."

"It's more than I do," said Straker.

She smiled subtly, mysteriously, tolerantly, as it were.

"What did you do it for, Philippa?"

Her smile grew more subtle, more tolerant, more mysterious; it measured him and found him wanting.

"If I told you," she said, "I don't think you'd understand. But I'll try and make you."

She turned with him and they walked slowly toward the house.

"You saw," she said, "where he was going before I came? I got him out of that, didn't I?"

He was silent, absorbed in contemplating the amazing fabric of her thought.

"Does it very much matter how I did it?"

"Yes," said Straker, "if you ask me, I should say it did. The last state of him, to my mind, was decidedly worse than the first."

"What do you suppose I did to him?"

"If you want the frankness of a brother, there's no doubt you--led him on."

"I led him on--to heights he'd never have contemplated without me."

Straker tried to eliminate all expression from his face.

"What do you suppose I did to him last night?"

"I can only suppose you led him further, since he went further."

By this time Straker's tact and delicacy were all gone.

"Yes," said Miss Tarrant, "he went pretty far. But, on the whole, it's just as well he did, seeing what's come of it."

"What _has_ come of it?"

"Well, I think he realizes that he has a soul. That's something."

"I didn't know it was his soul you were concerned with."

"He didn't, either. Did he tell you what I said to him?"

"He told me you gave him a dressing down. But there was something that he wouldn't tell. What _did_ you say to him?"

"I said I supposed, after all, he had a soul, and I asked him what he meant to do about it."

"What does he?"

"That's what I want him back for," she said, "to see. Whatever he does with it, practically I've saved it."

She turned to him, lucid and triumphant.

"Could any other woman have done it? Do you see Mary Probyn doing it?"

"Not that way."

"It was the only way. You must," she said, "have temperament."