The Younger Set Part 80

"Perhaps I was yawning. How do you know?" she smiled.

After a moment he said, still curious: "_Why_ were you crying, Eileen?"

"Crying! I didn't say I was crying."

"I a.s.sume it."

"To prove or disprove that a.s.sumption," she said coolly, amused, "let us hunt up a motive for a possible display of tears. What, Captain Selwyn, have I to cry about? Is there anything in the world that I lack?

Anything that I desire and cannot have?"

"_Is_ there?" he repeated.

"I asked you, Captain Selwyn."

"And, unable to reply," he said, "I ask you."

"And I," she retorted, "refuse to answer."

"Oho! So there _is_, then, something you lack? There _is_ a motive for possible tears?"

"You have not proven it," she said.

"You have not denied it."

She tipped back her head, linked her fingers under her chin, and looked at him across the smooth curve of her cheeks.

"Well--yes," she admitted, "I was crying--if you insist on knowing. Now that you have so cleverly driven me to admit that, can you also force me to tell you _why_ I was so tearful?"

"Certainly," he said promptly; "it was something Nina said that made you cry."

They both laughed.

"Oh, what a come-down!" she said teasingly. "You knew that before. But can you force me to confess to you _what_ Nina was saying? If you can you are the cleverest cross-examiner in the world, for I'd rather perish than tell you--"

"Oh," he said instantly, "then it was something about love!"

He had not meant to say it; he had spoken too quickly, and the flush of surprise on the girl's face was matched by the colour rising to his own temples. And, to retrieve the situation, he spoke too quickly again--and too lightly.

"A girl would rather perish than admit that she is in love?" he said, forcing a laugh. "That is rather a clever deduction, I think.

Unfortunately, however, I happen to know to the contrary, so all my cleverness comes to nothing."

The surprise had faded from her face, but the colour remained; and with it something else--something in the blue eyes which he had never before encountered there--the faintest trace of recoil, of shrinking away from him.

And she herself did not know it was there--did not quite realise that she had been hurt. Surprise that he had chanced so abruptly, so unerringly upon the truth had startled and confused her; but that he had made free of the truth so lightly, so carelessly, laughingly amused, left her without an answering smile.

That it had been an accident--a chance surmise which perhaps he himself did not credit--which he could not believe--made it no easier for her.

For the first time in his life he had said something which left her unresponsive, with a sense of bruised delicacy and of privacy invaded. A tinge of fear of him crept in, too. She did not misconstrue what he had said under privilege of a jest, but after what had once pa.s.sed between them she had not considered that love, even in the abstract, might serve as a mocking text for any humour or jesting sermon from a man who had asked her what he once asked--the man she had loved enough to weep for when she had refused him only because she lacked what he asked for.

Knowing that she loved him in her own innocent fashion, scarcely credulous that he ever could be dearer to her, yet shyly wistful for whatever more the years might add to her knowledge of a love so far immune from stress or doubt or the mounting thrill of a deeper emotion, she had remained confidently pa.s.sive, warmly loyal, reverencing the mystery of the love he offered, though she could not understand it or respond.

And now--now a chance turn; of a word--a trend to an idle train of thought, jestingly followed!--and, without warning, they had stumbled on a treasured memory, too frail, too delicately fragile, to endure the shock.

And now fear crept in--fear that he had forgotten, had changed. Else how could he have spoken so? ... And the tempered restraint of her quivered at the thought--all the serenity, the confidence in life and in him began to waver. And her first doubt crept in upon her.

She turned her expressionless face from him and, resting her cheek against the velvet back of the chair, looked out into the late afternoon sunshine.

All the long autumn without him, all her long, lonely, leisure hours in the golden weather, his silence, his withdrawal into himself, and his work, hitherto she had not misconstrued, though often she confused herself in explaining it. Impatience of his absence, too, had stimulated her to understand the temporary state of things--to know that time away from him meant for her only existence in suspense.

Very, very slowly, by degrees imperceptible, alone with memories of him and of their summer's happiness already behind her, she had learned that time added things to what she had once considered her full capacity for affection.

Alone with her memories of him, at odd moments during the day--often in the gay clamour and crush of the social routine--or driving with Nina, or lying, wide-eyed, on her pillow at night, she became conscious that time, little by little, very gradually but very surely, was adding to her regard for him frail, new, elusive elements that stole in to awake an unquiet pulse or stir her heart into a sudden thrill, leaving it fluttering, and a faint glow gradually spreading through her every vein.

She was beginning to love him no longer in her own sweet fashion, but in his; and she was vaguely aware of it, yet curiously pa.s.sive and content to put no question to herself whether it was true or false. And how it might be with him she evaded asking herself, too; only the quickening of breath and pulse questioned the pure thoughts unvoiced; only the increasing impatience of her suspense confirmed the answer which now, perhaps, she might give him one day while the blessed world was young.

At the thought she moved uneasily, shifting her position in the chair.

Sunset, and the swift winter twilight, had tinted, then dimmed, the light in the room. On the oak-beamed ceiling, across the ivory rosettes, a single bar of red sunlight lay, broken by rafter and plaster foliation. She watched it turn to rose, to ashes. And, closing her eyes, she lay very still and motionless in the gray shadows closing over all.

He had not yet spoken when again she lifted her eyes and saw him sitting in the dusk, one arm resting across his knee, his body bent slightly forward, his gaze vacant.

Into himself again!--silently companioned by the shadows of old thoughts; far from her--farther than he had ever been. For a while she lay there, watching him, scarcely breathing; then a faint shiver of utter loneliness came over her--of desire for his attention, his voice, his friendship, and the expression of it. But he never moved; his eyes seemed dull and unseeing; his face strangely gaunt to her, unfamiliar, hard. In the dim light he seemed but the ghost of what she had known, of what she had thought him--a phantom, growing vaguer, more unreal, slipping away from her through the fading light. And the impulse to arouse herself and him from the dim danger--to arrest the spell, to break it, and seize what was their own in life overwhelmed her; and she sat up, grasping the great arms of her chair, slender, straight, white-faced in the gloom.

But he did not stir. Then unreasoning, instinctive fear confused her, and she heard her own voice, sounding strangely in the twilight:

"What has come between us, Captain Selwyn? What has happened to us?

Something is all wrong, and I--I ask you what it is, because I don't know. Tell me."

He had lifted his head at her first word, hesitatingly, as though dazed.

"Could you tell me?" she asked faintly.

"Tell you what, child?"

"Why you are so silent with me; what has crept in between us? I"--the innocent courage sustaining her--"I have not changed--except a little in--in the way you wished. Have you?"

"No," he said in an altered voice.

"Then--what is it? I have been--you have left me so much alone this winter--and I supposed I understood--"

"My work," he said; but she scarcely knew the voice for his.

"I know; you have had no time. I know that; I ought to know it by this time, for I have told myself often enough. And yet--when we _are_ together, it is--it has been--different. Can you tell me why? Do you think me changed?"

"You must not change," he said.

"No," she breathed, wondering, "I could not--except--a little, as I told you."

"You must not change--not even that way!" he repeated in a voice so low she could scarcely hear him--and believed she had misunderstood him.

"I did not hear you," she said faintly. "What did you say to me?"