The Shuttle Part 53

"Upon my word," he said to himself. "She has a way with her, you know.

She is a combination of Ethel Newcome and Becky Sharp. But she is more level-headed than either of them, There's a touch of Trix Esmond, too."

The sense of the success which followed her, and the gradually-growing excitement of looking on at her light whirls of dance, the carnation of her cheek, and the laughter and pleasure she drew about her, had affected him in a way by which he was secretly a little exhilarated. He was conscious of a rash desire to force his way through these laughing, vaunting young idiots, juggle or s.n.a.t.c.h their dances away from them, and seize on the girl himself. He had not for so long a time been impelled by such agreeable folly that he had sometimes felt the stab of the thought that he was past it. That it should rise in him again made him feel young. There was nothing which so irritated him against Mount Dunstan as his own rebelling recognition of the man's youth, the strength of his fine body, his high-held head and clear eye.

These things and others it was which swayed him, as was plain to Betty in the time which followed, to many changes of mood.

"Are you sorry for a man who is ill and depressed," he asked one day, "or do you despise him?"

"I am sorry."

"Then be sorry for me."

He had come out of the house to her as she sat on the lawn, under a broad, level-branched tree, and had thrown himself upon a rug with his hands clasped behind his head.

"Are you ill?"

"When I was on the Riviera I had a fall." He lied simply. "I strained some muscle or other, and it has left me rather lame. Sometimes I have a good deal of pain."

"I am very sorry," said Betty. "Very."

A woman who can be made sorry it is rarely impossible to manage. To dwell with pathetic patience on your grievances, if she is weak and unintelligent, to deplore, with honest regret, your faults and blunders, if she is strong, are not bad ideas.

He looked at her reflectively.

"Yes, you are capable of being sorry," he decided. For a few moments of silence his eyes rested upon the view spread before him. To give the expression of dignified reflection was not a bad idea either.

"Do you know," he said at length, "that you produce an extraordinary effect upon me, Betty?"

She was occupying herself by adding a few st.i.tches to one of Rosy's ancient strips of embroidery, and as she answered, she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect.

"Good or bad?" she inquired, with delicate abstraction.

He turned his face towards her again--this time quickly.

"Both," he answered. "Both."

His tone held the flash of a heat which he felt should have startled her slightly. But apparently it did not.

"I do not like 'both,'" with composed lightness. "If you had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with pride. But 'both' leaves me unsatisfied. It interferes with the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent power. One likes to contemplate a large picture of one's self--not plain, but coloured--as a wholesale reformer."

"I see. Thank you," stiffly and flushing. "You do not believe me."

Her effect upon him was such that, for the moment, he found himself choosing to believe that he was in earnest. His desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this result. She ought to have been rather moved--a little fluttered, perhaps, at hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.

"You set yourself against me, as a child, Betty," he said. "And you set yourself against me now. You will not give me fair play. You might give me fair play." He dropped his voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well done. A touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.

"What would you consider fair play?" she inquired.

"It would be fair to listen to me without prejudice--to let me explain how it has happened that I have appeared to you a--a blackguard--I have no doubt you would call it--and a fool." He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture--impatient of himself--his fate--the tricks of bad fortune which it implied had made of him a more erring mortal than he would have been if left to himself, and treated decently.

"Do not put it so strongly," with conservative politeness.

"I don't refuse to admit that I am handicapped by a devil of a temperament. That is an inherited thing."

"Ah!" said Betty. "One of the temperaments one reads about--for which no one is to be blamed but one's deceased relatives. After all, that is comparatively easy to deal with. One can just go on doing what one wants to do--and then condemn one's grandparents severely."

A repellent quality in her--which had also the trick of transforming itself into an exasperating attraction--was that she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious of throughout his existence. If the injustice of fate has failed to bestow upon a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his exercise of the power to disturb, to enrage those who dare not resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being pa.s.sed over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying.

But in her case the inadequacy of the usual methods had forced itself upon him. It was as if the dart being aimed at her, she caught it in her hand in its flight, broke off its point and threw it lightly aside without comment. Most women cannot resist the temptation to answer a speech containing a sting or a reproach. It was part of her abnormality that she could let such things go by in a detached silence, which did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon them. This, he said, was the result of her beastly sense of security, which, in its turn, was the result of the atmosphere of wealth she had breathed since her birth. There had been no obstacle which could not be removed for her, no law of limitation had laid its rein on her neck. She had not been taught by her existence the importance of propitiating opinion.

Under such conditions, how was fear to be learned? She had not learned it. But for the devil in the blue between her lashes, he realised that he should have broken loose long ago.

"I suppose I deserved that for making a stupid appeal to sympathy," he remarked. "I will not do it again."

If she had been the woman who can be gently goaded into reply, she would have made answer to this. But she allowed the observation to pa.s.s, giving it free flight into s.p.a.ce, where it lost itself after the annoying manner of its kind.

"Have you any objection to telling me why you decided to come to England this year?" he inquired, with a casual air, after the pause which she did not fill in.

The bluntness of the question did not seem to disturb her. She was not sorry, in fact, that he had asked it. She let her work lie upon her knee, and leaned back in her low garden chair, her hands resting upon its wicker arms. She turned on him a clear unprejudiced gaze.

"I came to see Rosy. I have always been very fond of her. I did not believe that she had forgotten how much we had loved her, or how much she had loved us. I knew that if I could see her again I should understand why she had seemed to forget us."

"And when you saw her, you, of course, decided that I had behaved, to quote my own words--like a blackguard and a fool."

"It is, of course, very rude to say you have behaved like a fool, but--if you'll excuse my saying so--that is what has impressed me very much. Don't you know," with a moderation, which singularly drove itself home, "that if you had been kind to her, and had made her happy, you could have had anything you wished for--without trouble?"

This was one of the unadorned facts which are like bullets. Disgustedly, he found himself veering towards an outlook which forced him to admit that there was probably truth in what she said, and he knew he heard more truth as she went on.

"She would have wanted only what you wanted, and she would not have asked much in return. She would not have asked as much as I should. What you did was not businesslike." She paused a moment to give thought to it. "You paid too high a price for the luxury of indulging the inherited temperament. Your luxury was not to control it. But it was a bad investment."

"The figure of speech is rather commercial," coldly.

"It is curious that most things are, as a rule. There is always the parallel of profit and loss whether one sees it or not. The profits are happiness and friendship--enjoyment of life and approbation. If the inherited temperament supplies one with all one wants of such things, it cannot be called a loss, of course."

"You think, however, that mine has not brought me much?"

"I do not know. It is you who know."

"Well," viciously, "there HAS been a sort of luxury in it in lashing out with one's heels, and smashing things--and in knowing that people prefer to keep clear."

She lifted her shoulders a little.

"Then perhaps it has paid."

"No," suddenly and fiercely, "d.a.m.n it, it has not!"

And she actually made no reply to that.