The Tigress Part 57

"How are the sheep and the ewe lambs?" she asked, with a faint sign of mischief.

He smiled in return, pleased to note the change in her, even if it were but momentary.

"Safe in fold to-night, I hope," he answered, as a gust of wind blew the rain in vicious volleys against the panes.

"Tell me," she said presently. "How did Lord Kneedrock look the day you saw him at Bath?"

"Vexed," he answered. "Beastly angry, in fact."

"I'm sure he did. It was unkind of me not to see him, and to make an exception of you."

"That's altogether a matter of viewpoint. I think it was most kind."

"Of course you do. Men are all selfish animals."

"I think _that_ is unkind," he said reprovingly. "I'm not selfish where your happiness is concerned. I'd go to the ends of the earth to serve you, Nina."

"With another man left behind?"

"Yes. Even with another man left behind."

"That's what Kneedrock did," she told him. "And--and I can never forget it."

"And he can never forgive it," Andrews added.

Then he went away, and Nina pa.s.sed another sleepless night.

But he was back the next day by noon, to find her sitting in the same chair, with Tara lying at her feet, and the rain still beating its dismal tattoo on the window-panes. The room was in dusk.

She saw in his face that what she had feared, yet hoped against, he had brought her. She needed no word to confirm the dire thing told her by the duke. Poor Andrews seemed weighed down by the burden of his tidings.

His expression was as grim and dour as the day.

"But do they know who he is?" It was her first question, and it relieved him of the bald announcement he had dreaded.

"They don't," he answered quickly, glad to get the first plunge over.

"They haven't the faintest notion, apparently. I asked particularly."

"Poor Nibbetts," Nina sighed. "He doesn't look the typical n.o.bleman. Yet when he was a young man there wasn't a smarter in all London."

"That South Sea life took it out of him, I suppose."

"And the butchering the Boers gave him."

"I wonder if his present fix can't be traced back to that?" suggested her friend, leaning down and patting the staghound's head. "There's such a thing as traumatic insanity, you know."

She seemed to seize on this alternative possibility with eagerness.

"He has never been the same since he came back," she said. "That is certain. He was quite, quite different before he went to South Africa."

Then a question occurred to her, and she asked: "Has he shown any violence?"

"Not at the gardens. But they had heard of an a.s.sault he made outside the gates."

"Yes, I know. He attacked his valet for following him and daring to interfere."

"He has been very quiet in the tiger-house--except for that mumbling talk of his to the tigress. But that attracts attention--collects a crowd, you know--and they have to ask him to move on."

"And does he?"

"Oh, yes! Very peaceably. But he's back again in a little while, and then the same thing has to be repeated."

"Poor Hal!" sighed Nina, her locked hands tightly gripped.

"They hope he has gone away to stay, one of the guards told me. Ever since the row outside, they fear he may indulge in some outbreak in the grounds. There is talk of refusing him admission."

"If they only would," she said. And then, abruptly: "But you haven't told me of Mr. Widdicombe. Did you see him?"

Gerald smiled. "Yes, oh yes," he answered. "I saw him. But you were right. He wouldn't talk. He wouldn't open his mouth."

"He just sat dumb?"

"He turned to his desk and touched a bell. A clerk came and--that was all."

"You told him that _I_ wished to know?" There was something imperious in her emphasis.

"I did--yes." And again he questioned why that should bear any weight.

Although he did not voice it, she read it in his look.

"I'm his near kin, you know," she explained. "We are cousins."

"I understand," he told her, but he thought the explanation far short of adequate.

She got up and crossed the room, and from a drawer in an escritoire took out a small photograph, which she pa.s.sed to Andrews.

"That was taken in 1900," she said.

It was easy to recognize her in the slender, tallish girl, with ma.s.ses of fair hair, and clad in the simplest of white frocks. But he would never have known the slim young man with the waxed mustache for Lord Kneedrock, had she not told him. He wore outing flannels and a blazer of wide stripes, and his arm was about her youthful shoulders.

"It was taken at Henley," she said, "just for a lark. Look at the back."

He turned it over and found written there in pencil: "'Arry and his 'Arriet," in a man's hand.

"Hal used always to call me Harriet," she explained, and in spite of her, her voice shook.

He looked at her sharply as he handed it back, remembering just then a certain night in Simla when she told him that she had met her match and her mate in one.

"Does Widdicombe know about this?" he asked.