The Return of the Prodigal Part 55

But now that I have gone I simply can't come back again. Not yet. Perhaps never, till I have done the things I want to do.

"Of course you will be angry--it is so unexpected. But only think--you would not be angry, would you, if I married? You would have considered that perfectly legitimate. Yet it would have meant my leaving you for good. And what marriage and settling down in it is to other women, seeing the world and wandering about in it is to me--it's the thing I care for most.

We do not talk about these things, so this is the first you have heard of it. Think--if I had been very much in love with anyone I would have said nothing about it till I was all but engaged to him. It's the same thing. And it will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."

Here Frida's pen had come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a fresh page.

"I only mean to use a third of my income. The other two thousand will still go to keeping up the property. I have left everything so that my work could be taken up by anybody to-morrow."

The Colonel's eyes had dogged Durant's down to the bottom of the sheet, when he made a nervous attempt to recapture the letter. It was too late; the swing of Frida's impa.s.sioned pleading had carried Durant over the page, and one terse sentence had printed itself instantaneously on his brain. He handed back the letter without a word.

The Colonel drew Durant's arm in his and led him out through the window on to the gravel drive. Up and down, up and down, they walked for the s.p.a.ce of one hour, while the Colonel poured out his soul. He went bareheaded, he lifted up his face to the heavens, touched to a deeper anguish by the beauty of the young day.

"Lord, what a perfect morning! Look at this place she's left; look at it! I've nursed the little property for her; it was as much hers as if I was in my grave, Durant. She's lived in it for nearly thirty years, ever since she was no higher than that flower-pot, and she thinks nothing of leaving it. She thinks nothing of leaving _me_.

And I've got more work to do than my brain's fit for; why I was in the very thick of my Primrose League correspondence, up to the neck in all manner of accounts; and she knew it, and chose this time.

I've got to give a lecture next week in Whithorn parish-room, a lecture on 'Imperialism,' and I've my little chronicle on hand, too; but it's nothing to her. The whole thing's a mystery to me. I can't think what can have made her do it. She never was a girl that cared for gadding about, and for society and that. As for trying to make me believe that I should be no worse off if she married, the question has never risen, Durant. She hasn't married. She never even wanted to be married. She never would have been married."

"That makes it all the more natural that she should want to see something of the world instead."

"No, it's not natural. I could have understood her wanting to get married, that's natural enough; but what's a woman got to do with seeing the world? It's not as if she was my son, Durant."

Durant listened and wondered. As far as he could make out, the Colonel's att.i.tude to his daughter was twofold. On the one hand, he seemed to regard her as part of the little property, and as existing for the sake of the little property, from which point of view she had acquired a certain value in his eyes. On the other hand, he looked upon her as an inferior part of Himself, and as existing for the sake of Himself; it was a view old as the hills and the earth they were made of, being the paternal side of the simple primeval att.i.tude of the man to the woman. And, seeing that the little property was a mere drop in the ocean of the Colonel's egoism, this view might be said to include the other as the greater includes the less. On either theory Frida Tancred was not supposed to have any rights, or, indeed, any substantial existence of her own; she was an attribute, an adjunct.

"Seeing the world--fiddlesticks! Don't tell me there isn't something else at the bottom of it--it's an insult to my intelligence."

As everything the Colonel did not understand was an insult to his intelligence, his intelligence must have had to put up with an extraordinary number of affronts.

He leaned heavily on the young man's arm. "It's shaken me. I shall never be the fellow I was. I can't understand it. n.o.body could have done more for any girl than I've done for Frida; and she deserts me, Durant, deserts me in my old age with my strength failing."

Durant vainly tried to make himself worthy of Frida Tancred's trust, but he could add nothing to her reasoning, and she had kept her best argument to the last,--"It will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."

"After all, sir, will it make so very much difference if--if your daughter does go away for a year or two?"

"I can't say. I can't tell you that till I've tried it, my boy. It's all too new to me, and I tell you I can't understand it."

He trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser Lear, and reentered the house by the window of Frida's room. The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.

"Look at that. She was my right hand, Maurice, and I can't realize that she's gone. It's the queerest sensation; I feel as if she was here and yet wasn't here."

Durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the amputation of their right hands. As for the wound, he hoped that time would heal it.

"Any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, Durant.

I think that was the luncheon bell."

Lunch, over which the Colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the remoter past. An hour later he was playing with his little rain-gauge on the lawn. At afternoon teatime he appeared immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white pique waistcoat, the least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.

At this figure Durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds contempt. He longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding badly. He was bound to believe that the Colonel had a heart under his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you p.r.i.c.ked the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.

The Colonel had scarcely swallowed his tea when Durant saw him trotting off in the direction of the cottage; there was that about him which, considering his recent bereavement, suggested an almost indecent haste. He returned and sat down to dinner, flushed but uncommunicative. He seemed aware that it was Durant's last night, and it was after some weak attempts to give the meal a commemorative and farewell character, half-festal, half-funereal, that he sank into silence, and remained brooding over the ice pudding in his att.i.tude of owl-like inscrutability. But during the privacy of dessert his mystic mood took flight; he hopped, as it were, onto a higher perch; he stretched the wing of victory and gazed at it admiringly; there was an effect as of the preening of young plumage, the fluttering of innumerable feathers.

And, with champagne running in his veins like the sap of spring, he proclaimed his engagement to that charming lady, Mrs. Fazakerly.

Durant had no sooner congratulated him on the event than he remembered that he had left the postscript of Miss Tancred's letter unanswered. She had said, "Write and tell me how he takes it"; she had hoped that he would not be unhappy. So he wrote: "He took it uncommonly well" (that was not strictly true, but Durant was determined to set Frida Tancred's conscience at rest, even if he had to tamper a little with his own). "I should not say that he will be very unhappy. On the contrary, he has just a.s.sured me that he is the happiest man on earth. He is engaged to be married to Mrs.

Fazakerly."

It was a masterly stroke on Mrs. Fazakerly's part, and it had followed so closely on the elopement (as closely, indeed, as consequence on cause) that Durant had to admit that he had grossly underrated the powers of this remarkable woman. He had been lost in admiration of Miss Chatterton's elaborate intrigue and bold independent action; but now he came to think of it, though Miss Chatterton's style was more showy, Mrs. Fazakerly had played by far the better game of the two. Durant, who had regarded himself as a trump card up Mrs. Fazakerly's sleeve, perceived with a pang that he had counted for nothing in the final move. Mrs. Fazakerly had not, as he idiotically supposed, been greatly concerned with Frida Tancred's att.i.tude toward him. She had divined nothing, imagined nothing, she had been both simpler and subtler than he knew. She had desired the removal of Frida Tancred from her path, and at the right moment she had produced Georgie Chatterton. She had played her deliberately, staking everything on the move. Georgie's independence had been purely illusory. She had appeared at Mrs. Fazakerly's bidding, she had behaved as Mrs. Fazakerly had foreseen, she had removed Frida Tancred, and Durant had been nowhere. Mrs. Fazakerly's little gray eyes could read the characters of men and women at a glance, and as instantly inferred their fitness or unfitness for her purpose. She might be a poor hand at the game of whist, but at the game of matrimony she was magnificent and supreme.

Frida had said, "We sail to-morrow"; therefore, Durant walked all the way to Whithorn-in-Arden to post his letter, so that it might reach her before she left London. And as he came back across the dewy path in the dim light, and Coton Manor raised its forehead from the embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has lifted the body at resurrection time.

And he, too, was set at liberty.

He left by the slow early train on Wednesday without waiting for the afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to get away from Coton Manor. The Colonel accompanied him to the station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarra.s.sment, he found Mrs. Fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off.

He could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement, not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into his face.

"You don't congratulate me, Mr. Durant."

"On what?" he asked moodily.

"On having done a good deed."

"A good deed?"

"Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida Tancred?"

Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own, she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done, and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.

"Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the line----"

"Does one?"

He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."

"I don't see it."

"Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light behind the _pince-nez_ as she smiled up into his face. "I have cleared the way."

"For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not altogether wrong.

But Durant was always an imaginative man. And as he sped on the same journey over the same rails, his imagination followed Frida Tancred in her flight toward freedom and the unknown.

THE COSMOPOLITAN

PART II

OUTWARD BOUND