The Prisoners of Hartling/Chapter 10
THE arrangements for breakfast at Hartling were in keeping with Arthur's early estimate of the place as a first-class hotel. The members of the family came down when they chose, and between eight and ten o'clock there were rarely more than two people in the breakfast-room at the same time. Miss Kenyon and Hubert came first. Hubert had a habit of getting up at six in the summer, and Miss Kenyon was a precisian. Arthur succeeded them between half-past eight and nine and sometimes had his aunt for a companion. The other four straggled in uncertainly—Joe Kenyon or his sister was always the last—and occasionally their meals overlapped. So much Arthur knew from experience, and as he had never seen Eleanor in the morning, he had inferred that she probably breakfasted with her grandfather upstairs.
He was greatly surprised, therefore, to find her at the table when he entered the room at half-past eight the next morning, surprised and for a minute or two distinctly embarrassed. He was never now in the mood for conversation so early in the day.
Until he had come to Hartling he had always been fresh and eager in the morning, but the Kenyons were taciturn and inclined to be irritable at that time, and by degrees their example had influenced him. He presumed that it was their example, but he was not sure whether or not he could attribute to the same source the sense of dissatisfaction with himself that commonly haunted him now when he first woke; dissatisfaction and a strange feeling of staleness and of disinclination to begin his easy, amusing day.
He addressed her as he might have addressed a casual acquaintance in a hotel.
"Don't often see you down here in the morning," he remarked vapidly, as he rang the bell.
"I've been given a holiday to-day," she said, without looking up. "And I was to tell you that you needn't go up this morning. My grandfather says he's feeling a little tired."
"He had rather an exciting day," Arthur agreed; investigated the cold dishes on the sideboard, and then crossed the room and sat down opposite her.
Eleanor went on quietly with her breakfast. She seemed prepared, he thought, to sit there in silence for the rest of the meal, while he on his part could think of no reasonably intelligent conversation. After the interval provided by the entrance of the butler, however, an opening presented itself to him.
"What are you going to do with your holiday?" he asked. "It'll be rather too wet for tennis, won't it?"
"I'm going for a long walk into Sussex," she said.
His first thought was that he would now find no opportunity for a quiet talk alone with her that day.
"All alone?" he asked.
"I long to be alone, sometimes," she murmured.
"It seems to me that you spend most of your time alone," he said. "We don't see much of you." She looked up at him with an expression that seemed to indicate both surprise and disappointment. "One can never be alone in the house," she said.
He did not understand. "Are you always with your grandfather?" he asked.
She shook her head and looked down again at her plate, as she said, "I meant that I couldn't think my own thoughts here."
"And what do you think about when you're out all by yourself in Sussex?" he inquired. He felt that his tone was not right, that it held a suggestion of the jocular; but he felt shy and ill at ease, afraid of being too serious.
"Just my own thoughts," she said quietly.
He wanted to say something rather profound to show that he understood and sympathised, but every sentence he tried over in his mind appeared trivial and banal. He kept his head down as he muttered finally. "I've often wondered what you think about things."
She made no reply to that, and he was afraid to look at her. His speech had sounded rather surly, he thought, and with the idea of amending it, he continued, "I mean that every one seems to take things for granted here, except you."
"What sort of things?" she asked in a low voice.
"Oh, well! speculations about life in general," he tried.
"Yes, I don't think any of us are much given to that sort of thing," she replied.
There had been some effect of a smile in her tone as she spoke, and he looked up and saw that she was indeed smiling, if a trifle ruefully.
"Not even you?" he asked.
She disregarded the implied flattery that distinguished her from all the other members of the family. "Have you done much speculating about life in general since you've been here?" she returned.
He had hardly begun his breakfast yet, but he laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. "I wish you would let me come with you to-day," he said. "There are a heap of things I want to talk to you about. I know you don't like me, but it would be a real kindness if you would let me talk to you a little sometimes. There's simply no one here I can explain things to."
"Why me?" she replied.
"You're so different from all the others," he said.
"And are you?" she asked.
"Different from the others?" he repeated, staggered by the suggestion that he could be thought to resemble, in any particular, the other members of the Hartling circle.
"Yes," she prompted him quietly.
He stared at her frowning. "Am I the least like them?" he inquired with a faint trepidation in his voice.
"Not yet, perhaps; but you will be," she said.
"But they aren't like each other," he remonstrated. "Which of them shall I be like if I stay long enough, Uncle Joe, or Mr Turner, or Hubert …?"
"Aren't they all rather alike in one way?" she asked.
He saw at once that they were; that there was some characteristic common to every one of them, even Miss Kenyon. Seen as individuals they were as different from each other as are the ears of wheat in a cornfield, but they all bowed the same way to the prevailing wind. In their attitude towards the head of the house they could all be relied upon to present the same face.
"But you've been here fourteen years," he said, "and you're still different. Or do you think it takes longer than that to get assimilated?"
"I'm not different," she replied. "Or I shouldn't be here still."
"Of course, I don't know you," he said. "I've hardly seen you since the first three or four days I was here. But—well—I can't agree with you about that."
She just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
"You haven't said whether you will let me come with you on your walk," he began again, after a short pause.
"I would sooner you didn't," she told him. "It can't do any good. There can be nothing new that you want to ask my advice about. I said all I had to say to you about that five weeks ago, and you took no notice. I can only repeat what I said then."
"But I can't go now," he protested. "I've given my promise. I made a sort of bargain in fact."
She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't keep it," she said.
"That's absurd," he remonstrated, getting to his feet. "Of course I must keep my promise in any circumstances."
"I suppose you do really believe that?" she asked, looking up at him. "Would you keep it just the same, for instance, if you knew for certain that it meant staying on here for ten years and getting nothing, absolutely nothing, at the end of it? Would you, honestly? Or don't you think you'd ask to be let off?"
"I might ask to be let off," he admitted, after a few seconds' thought.
"Then you'll only be keeping your promise or bargain or whatever it is because you want to stay—or because you've got to," she said.
"Perhaps," he agreed. "But I've never said that I didn't want to stay. I do."
She sighed. "Precisely, and now we're back again to what I said just now. Whatever is the good of talking to me about it?"
"We might talk about other things," he suggested. "I should very much like to get away, too, for a few hours."
She hid her face in her hands, leaning her elbows on the table, and he waited patiently for her answer.
"Why don't you finish your breakfast?" she asked, when she looked up after what seemed to him a long interval of silence.
"I have. I don't want anything more," he said.
She got up then, and he thought she was going to leave him without deigning to take any further notice of his request, but when she was half-way across the room, she looked back and said, "Can you be ready in ten minutes?"
He started forward with the eagerness of a dog beckoned by its mistress. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, hardly understanding his own excitement.
She stood still regarding him with an expression that was half-amused and half-disdainful. "I didn't know you were so keen on long walks," she remarked, "or on getting away from here. Isn't this rather a new departure for you?"
The look of eagerness left his face. "Perhaps it is," he said stiffly. "And it's hardly likely to be much of a success if—if you're going to take that sort of tone."
"I told you that I didn't want you to come," she replied, and there was something of defiance in her tone and in the pose of her firm, upright figure.
"I should at least like to know why you have taken such a dislike to me," he said. "But you might not feel inclined to tell me that in any case."
"Oh! dislike," she responded, almost contemptuously. "That's much too strong a word."
He had a sense of hopeless frustration. All her half-unwilling responses appeared now to have been nothing more than a condescension to his ineptitude. And he was all too horribly conscious of the fact that he deserved nothing better than her contemptuous opinion of him. He was just an average young man of twenty-eight. He had done nothing that thousands of other young men had not done as well or better. The only boast he could have made would have been that of ambition, a boast that was no longer possible for him after his recent admission that he meant to stay on at Hartling and liked being there. He knew intuitively what her reply would be, if he told her that he meant to study, to prepare himself for the work of a specialist. Indeed, he himself saw that project, now, as little more than a fatuous piece of self-deception. Practice was what he wanted: book-work would be no good without that. And in five years he would be soft and over-fed; his nerve would be gone.
He looked down and began to trace the pattern of the carpet with his toe. "Yes, I'm not worth hating," he muttered.
She turned away with a gesture of impatience. "Well, shall you be ready in ten minutes?" she threw at him over her shoulder.
"But if you would so much sooner I didn't come…" he conceded humbly.
"I'll meet you in the hall," she said, as she went out.
He hesitated again while he was putting on his shoes. If she merely despised him, as she obviously did, what was the use of trying to win her confidence? Nothing he could say or do would alter her opinion of him. He had nothing to say. There was nothing he could do. The most he could hope for would be to defend his position by argument. He had little doubt that her contempt for him was based on the fact that he had consented to stay on at Hartling; and it might be well that she had not, as yet, a proper understanding of his reasons. She might not have heard of his verbal compact with the family made the previous day? Was it worth while attempting his own defence?
He was still weighing that question when she joined him in the hall. He continued to weigh it as they walked together in silence down the length of the garden.
The clouds were lifting, and before they reached the big gates the sun broke through. He looked up, noted the promise of a hot, fine day, and his spirits began to rise. What did it matter whether or not she despised him? He was a free man. He was not in any way dependent upon her opinion. If she chose to snub him, he could leave her to continue her walk alone. He could be perfectly happy without her He was twenty-eight, in perfect health, and without a care in the world. Why shouldn't he enjoy life in his own way? If he had a regret at that moment, it was that he had eaten hardly any breakfast.
He began to whistle softly under his breath. He had no intention of beginning the conversation. He was content to enjoy the day and the adventure of this walk—the first he had undertaken since he had come to Hartling. Except for the path to the links and the links themselves, he knew nothing of the country round about. None of the family ever seemed to bother about going outside the grounds. They had this amazing garden and were, presumably, satisfied with that.
How little Eleanor was satisfied with it, however, was shown the moment they passed through the gates into the dusty high-road. She set back her shoulders, lifted her head, and gave a sigh of relief. "It's going to be fine, after all," she said. "I think we'll strike across country to a place I know where we can look right over to the South Downs. It's so big and open there."
There was no hint of embarrassment or restraint in her manner. She might have forgotten everything that had passed between them that morning; and Arthur, on his side, was quite willing to postpone his arguments and explanations, or even to omit them altogether. If she were going to treat him decently for the time being, that was all he asked.
"Sounds jolly," he said.
"It's seven or eight miles," she warned him.
"Oh! that's nothing," he returned. "I'm good for all that and more. But are you?"
"I've done it twice in the last ten days," she said.
"This holiday of yours is not altogether an exception to the general rule, then?" he asked.
"I've been out several times—lately," she admitted.
He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?"
She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind.
They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead.
Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though."
"We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?"
He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind."
"Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about—being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't."
She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war.
"I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess—Elizabeth and I shared a governess then—not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness.
"But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said.
"I might have been a nurse," she protested.
"If you had you couldn't have come in till right at the end," he returned, "and, Lord, we had quite enough amateurs at that game as it was. Though, as it happens, it crossed my mind that you would make a good nurse the first time I saw you."
"I believe I should, too," she agreed. "I hope I may be some day."
He made no comment on that though he was aware that something within him resented the thought of her ever becoming a professional nurse.
"You did go through the war, at all events," she went on, rather as if she sought an excuse for him.
"I, and about five million other men," he put in, determined to take no credit on that score.
"It makes a difference, all the same," she returned.
"To what?" he asked.
"Oh! everything comes back to the same place," she said, looking out straight in front of her. "I knew it would, when you asked to come with me. When I'm alone I'm dishonest enough to forget—deliberately. I can—generally. I lose myself in other thoughts."
"Meaning that I'm spoiling your day," he put in. "But I don't see why we should talk about—that—if you'd sooner not. I can forget too.
"No, no, we must talk about it," she said, "only I find it so difficult to begin. There are some things—one thing at all events that you don't know and that I find it very hard to tell you. But let's wait until after lunch. You had no breakfast, and I know a funny little lost place on our way, where we can get something to eat. It won't be anything but ham and eggs, and bread and cheese, of course."
Arthur felt that he wanted nothing better just then, and said so.
"Afterwards," she concluded, "we will go to that place where you look across to the South Downs, and—and—have it all out."
He was quite content with that. Whatever "having it all out" might portend, she was treating him now frankly and with a certain confidence. Her manner since they had left Hartling behind them, had completely changed. She might presently criticise him in a way that he would find intolerable. They might openly quarrel. But anything would be better to endure than that air of contempt and reserve she had displayed at breakfast. He would, at least, be given the opportunity to defend himself. He felt sure that she had not understood his attitude, as yet.
Their immediate difficulty was to find a topic of conversation that would avoid any kind of reference to the affairs of Hartling, and a few experiments further demonstrated how the thought of those affairs was, just then, obsessing them to the exclusion of all other interests. All that seemed possible were disjointed scraps of comment upon the scenery, or the wild flowers and ferns of that luxuriant Sussex country—until they reached Eleanor's little wayside inn, and could drop into the familiar interchanges of two rather hungry young people awaiting the inevitable fried ham and eggs that was being prepared for them.
The inn lay in a valley, and as soon as they finished their meal, Eleanor pointed to the hill in front of them.
"We have to climb that and then we are there," she said. "Shall we go now?"
Arthur agreed willingly enough. He was both eager and apprehensive; at once anxious to hear what she had to say and a little fearful of the effect. So long as they could walk together in silence he had a pleasant feeling of content in her company. Surely she liked him better since they had been alone together? She had not given the least sign of despising him in the course of the past two hours.
Yet even when they had reached the summit of the hill that marked the limit of their journey, Eleanor still hesitated.
She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky.
Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life.
They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,—
"Well, shall we talk now and—and get it over?"
She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,—
"We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same—perhaps for years and years."
"In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this—this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope."
"It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling."
He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; why?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension.
"Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to—to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply, "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?"
He waited for a few seconds after she had finished before he said quietly, "I ought to have guessed really; but I didn't. He said something to me about it yesterday morning—that he had hoped you and I would be friends, or something of the sort."
"And you, what did you say?" she put in.
"I told him that I was afraid you didn't like me, and then he said that in that case there was nothing more to be done. We didn't mention it again. It was before I told him about Hubert."
"Though, whether I like you or not has nothing whatever to do with it, of course," she commented thoughtfully.
"Hasn't it?" he asked, as if he doubted that inference.
"Nothing whatever," she insisted.
"Still if—I mean—it seems to me that …" he began; but she cut him short by saying with an impatient lift of her chin,—
"I know what you mean, perfectly well. You needn't try to put it into words. That isn't really the point at all."
"What is the point then?" he asked in bewilderment. "I may be frightfully stupid, but I can't quite see …"
She turned her face still farther away from him as she said in a scarcely audible voice, "Nothing should ever induce me to be a bait for you."
A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them.
"You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to—throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction.
"Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly.
"But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?"
"He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you—you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he—he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's—oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him.
"Oh! surely not," Arthur protested.
She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said.
"He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically.
"Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time.
"Something," he acknowledged.
"Did he tell you how my father pleaded with him, offered to do or to be anything, if only he might be allowed to marry my mother?"
Arthur shook his head. "No, he didn't tell me that. What was his objection?" he said.
"My father never knew—unless it was that my mother had no money of her own. I only know what Uncle Joe told me, of course, but he heard all about it at the time. I don't believe that he had any real objection. You can never be sure whether he will say yes or no to anything, but you may be quite certain whichever it is, that he will stick to it afterwards whatever happens. And he said 'No' to my father, and turned him out of the house because he was willing to give up anything in the world rather than my mother. And when he had been gone about a month he sent that elephant's foot that stands in the hall. He meant it as an insult. Uncle Joe says that they were afraid to tell him. They all knew what it meant, of course; that it was a sort of symbol of his methods. But he wasn't the least bit insulted. He seemed to be proud of it, and had it put where it is now, for every one to see."
She had been speaking rapidly, almost fiercely, with an excitement completely unlike her usual rather staid manner.
"But why have you gone on staying there if you feel like that?" Arthur asked.
She put her hands up to her face for a moment and then looked at him with a whimsical smile. "You aren't the only person who has been blind," she said.
"Do you mean that you have only been feeling like that just lately?" he asked.
"I was only seven when I came," she said, "and I was brought up there. I never went to school. And you take things for granted when you're brought up in a place because it's the only world you know, and you think the others must be much about the same. I did begin to wake up a little in the last year of the war, but even then it all seemed natural enough in a way. He was so old, and one made all sorts of excuses for him. And then, of course, for months or even years at a time he seems to be as sweet and gentle as any one could be. He can be most awfully kind to people. …" She paused on a reflective note, as if she still sought excuses for him.
"But what happened to make you change your mind just lately?" Arthur prompted her.
She blushed vividly, and again turned her eyes towards the lavender distances of the downs. "I've really seen the thing happening for myself," she said in a low voice. I'd had hints from Uncle Joe before, plenty of them; but like you I didn't believe them. There was more excuse for me. I had been brought up with it. I believed he was odd, eccentric. He might seem rather cruel sometimes; but I thought, as I suppose you do still, that he was really trying to do the best for every one."
"But you don't now?" Arthur asked.
"I've been watching him—and thinking—since you came," she said slowly, hesitating between her phrases. "And it has seemed—as if I had got the key of a puzzle that had been worrying me. It—it worked. It accounted for so much that had been just a little mysterious. I have had, sometimes, a horrid feeling of uneasiness and have been angry with myself for doubting him. But after you came—I suppose it was just an accident that it was connected with you, more particularly; it would have been just the same with any one else, of course—well after that, as I said just now, I saw it all happening."
She paused, but Arthur made no reply. He was leaning on his elbow looking down over the broken sweep of the weald. For him, the "key" of which she had spoken was not yet plain. There were traits in the character of the old man, that Arthur believed were not consistent with Eleanor's judgment of him as "inhuman."
His mind was busy with the search for excuses and extenuations, when Eleanor began in a new voice, "I suppose you think it very rotten of me to have said all that about him, and, in any case, you don't believe me."
"I do; I do," Arthur protested, rousing himself from his abstraction. "I don't think it's rotten of you in the very least. What I'm doubting is whether your deductions are sound."
She appeared now to have given up any hope of persuading him, and looked at him with a frank smile as she said, "Well, I suppose we ought to be setting our faces towards home?"
"Oh, no! not yet," Arthur replied, with such evident distress in his voice that she laughed outright.
"But surely you must be pining to get back to your golf and billiards and croquet?" she suggested. "Or, if we start now, we might get in some tennis after tea."
"I don't believe I have ever heard you laugh before to-day," was Arthur's answer.
"It isn't exactly a gay house, is it?" she replied.
"My Lord, no, it isn't," Arthur agreed, after a moment's reflection; "though I don't think I'd thought of it like that before. Elizabeth always laughs as if she had been wound up inside and set going, and none of the others really laugh at all. Certainly Hubert doesn't. I wonder if Miss Martin will?"
Eleanor's face grew grave again. "Oh! the poor dear," she exclaimed. "She'll probably get my job."
"Your job?" Arthur ejaculated. "But you're not going to give it up, are you?"
She smiled tolerantly. "Didn't I begin by saying that?" she reminded him. "Either you or I will have to go, and it's quite clear that you can't."
"Can't?" he repeated "If you go …"
She gave him no time to complete his sentence. "As you pointed out this morning," she put in quickly, "you've promised to stay. My conscience is clear of promises, at any rate."
"But, good Lord, where could you go to? What could you do?" he remonstrated.
"I could go to the Paynes," she said, "the people who brought me over from Rio. He has retired from the Cable Company and they're living at a place called Northwood, somewhere near London, I think. I couldn't stay with them indefinitely, of course, but they would help me to get something to do. I'm quite well educated for a commercial career. Grandfather didn't want me to learn typewriting and shorthand, but he's glad now, because they're so useful to him. My job isn't a sinecure, you know. I do really work quite hard. You'd be surprised what a big correspondence my grandfather has about his money affairs. And then I've got French, and I can read German, though I write it rather badly. I should think I ought to be worth about three pounds a week."
"Oh, no!" Arthur exclaimed in despair. He could not endure the thought of her working in a city office.
"But oh, yes!" she said. "I was thinking about it all before you came. The war made me dissatisfied. We none of us did anything, and I couldn't help feeling what empty, useless lives we were living here."
"I don't see that you'd be doing anything more by working for a millionaire in the city than by working for Mr Kenyon," Arthur put in.
"I know. That weighed with me," she agreed. "What I really want is to be a nurse. Only I don't quite know how to begin. But you can tell me about that, can't you?"
He pushed her inquiry on one side. "I can't see," he said, "why either you or I have to leave. I can't really."
She had been talking to him freely, almost gaily, but now her manner took on the air of constraint with which she had begun the conversation.
"Need we go back to that?" she asked.
"Why, of course we must," he said in an aggrieved tone. "As far as I can see that's what we came out to talk about."
"But we settled it," she returned. "I'm going!"
"And if I went? If I broke my promise and went instead, would you stay?"
"I might for the sake of the others," she said. "I do help them a little. And in spite of everything, I'm sorry for him—for that wicked old man upstairs." She dropped her voice and looked down at her clasped hands as she concluded, "He is wicked, although you may not believe it."
"Even so," Arthur argued, choosing to ignore that point for the moment, "I don't in the least understand why my going should make any difference one way or the other."
She bent her head a little lower as she said, "No doubt it's very quixotic and sentimental of me, but I can't bear to watch your life being ruined. It's different with the others. They're so helpless. Hubert is not fit to earn his own living, and Ken—if he comes—would probably be safer there than he would in town. He is very wild. If he comes, he'll probably marry Elizabeth and settle down."
Arthur saw that at last the time had come to set out his defence. "Yes, but why take it for granted that I should be wasting my life?" he began, and then, with one or two pauses at first, but gathering confidence in his own argument as he went on, he laid before her his plans for studying at Hartling and his hope for the future.
She listened to him attentively, attempting no comment, either by word or gesture until he had finished. He believed that he had convinced her, until she said gently,—
"And if my grandfather lives more than five years? What then?"
"He can't," Arthur expostulated. "People don't live as long as that."
"A few do," she said, "I saw in one of the papers a day or two ago, that Miss Spurgeon, the preacher's aunt, would be one hundred and one next month."
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "Frightfully exceptional case," he muttered.
"This might be a frightfully exceptional case, too," she insisted. "You don't find anything wrong with him, do you? And he lives such a sheltered, detached sort of life. Nothing ever upsets him. He hasn't altered the least little bit, all the years I have known him. And you know, don't you, that thirty years ago it began in just the same way with the others? They thought that he wouldn't live more than I've years, or ten at the outside." She could not look at him, as she concluded gently, "Don't waste your life as they've done. Anything would be better than that."
He saw it all quite clearly. He knew that she was right. But something within him continued to protest fiercely against her advice. He could no longer doubt that she was entirely disinterested. He was consoled, even a trifle flattered, by the fact that she so evidently desired his welfare. But he didn't want to leave Hartling, and he feverishly sought excuses for staying. He could find half a dozen that would satisfy himself, but he knew them for sophistries and dared not put them into words.
She, on her side, seemed disinclined to add anything to what she had already said, and for some minutes they sat in silence. Eleanor returned to her study of the distant downs and Arthur, with his head in his hands, furiously sought an escape from the dilemma imposed by her two alternatives.
It was Eleanor who at last broke the long silence. "I must be going now," she said—sighed, rose to her feet, and began to brush and shake the grass from her skirt. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said," she continued, "and in any case we shall have plenty of time to say it on the way back."
He nodded rather resentfully and followed a pace or two behind her as they made their way down the hill. He could not as yet overcome the feeling that it was "hard lines" on him to be sent away from Hartling. For that was what it all amounted to. He would have to go—promise or no promise. He could not possibly allow her to get work in some city office, or enter herself as probationer at a hospital, while he idled away his time at Hartling. Also he hated the thought of her mixing either with city clerks or young medical students. They were a coarse lot, and she would certainly meet with all kinds of beastly advances. In imagination he could hear the men at the hospital talking about her among themselves, and his face burnt with anger, first at the intolerable familiarities of his hypothetical students, and then with himself for thinking these thoughts in connection with her. Still she would know how to protect herself. No one could be more aloof and cold than she was sometimes. If that warm generosity of hers did not betray her? Those silly young fools at the hospital would not understand. They … He found a relief in mentally cursing the particular type of young medical student he had all too vividly pictured. He saw himself taking one of them by the throat and choking the life out of him.
No, it was obvious that in no circumstances whatever, could she be permitted to face that kind of life. Plenty of nice girls did, of course; but she was different. And a city office would be just as bad, or worse. It was impossible to imagine her mixing with a crowd of dirty little Cockney clerks or greasy business men. Damn them.
After all, Peckham would not be so bad. Somers was one of the best and would be tremendously glad to hear that he was coming back. Only—that would be the end, so far as any hope of seeing Eleanor was concerned—until the old man died—and it was perfectly true, as she had said, that he might be an example of one of those exceptional cases of longevity. He saw the probability more clearly now that his interest was more detached. Up there at the house, they were compelled to cheat themselves with the belief that it could not last much longer. Life would not be endurable without that hope. They had been living on it, some of them, for forty years. …
He suddenly awoke to the fact that this might be the last time he would be alone with Eleanor and that he was wasting it in these perfectly detestable reflections, when he might be talking to her.
"I've made up my mind," he said, quickening his pace to catch her up. "I'll go. You're quite right. I can't stay there now."
She looked up at him with a hint of question in her face.
"I couldn't stand the thought of your going into a hospital or an office," he continued. "You've no idea of the sort of thing that you have to put up with and the people that you have to mix with; no idea."
"Oh! but I don't want you to go in order to save me," she exclaimed.
"But you'd go to save me," he returned.
She gave a little protesting laugh. "No, I shouldn't save you if I went," she said. "You would stay on here then. All I said was that I would not be used as an influence to make you stay. You remember what I told you about my grandfather's plans. Well, sooner than that, I'd do anything. It's purely selfish, I admit that. I don't mind your being ruined, you see, but I won't take any sort of responsibility for it."
"But in that case," he submitted. "I might stop on for a time at all events, if it was quite certain that you weren't the case of my staying.
"No, no; don't begin like that," she broke out passionately. "Once you begin to procrastinate and find excuses there'll be no end to it. That must have been how they all began."
"You're evidently most frightfully anxious to get rid of me," he grumbled. He had seen a ray of hope and resented her instant extinction of it.
"Oh! don't be so babyish!" she said petulantly. "You must know that it hasn't anything to do with getting rid of you."
"I don't see what else it can be," he returned sulkily.
She shrugged her shoulders but attempted no other answer, and they did not speak again until they were back in the deep, overhung lane and within half a mile of Hartling. It was there that he made his last effort.
"Would it be risking too much if I stayed on for just one more week?" he asked. His spurt of temper had evaporated and he was once more humble, concilating.
"Why a week?" she replied doubtfully.
He braced himself to make the test he had been considering for the last half-hour. "I should like to have one more talk with you before I go."
"And you wouldn't say anything to my grandfather in the meanwhile?"
"No. If I did he might sling me out."
"You believe he'd do that, then?"
"Oh, yes! I believe that."
"But not that he is—inhuman?"
"I find it difficult. No, I can't credit that."
"But you would stick to your idea of going at the end of a week from now?"
"Absolutely."
"I wonder if it's wise to let you stay a week?" she murmured half to herself.
"Seven days surely can't make any difference," he pleaded.
"Exactly; so why have them?" she returned.
"No difference so far as my prospects are concerned," he said.
"Oh, no!" she replied quickly, as if she were afraid that he might go on to elaborate his reasons for wanting his week's grace. "But are you quite sure of yourself? Are you sure that at the end of the week you won't want to put it off again?"
"I give you my word of honour," he said solemnly, and went on, "I've made up my mind. I'll write to Somers as soon as I get in and tell him to expect me next Tuesday."
They reached the gates of Hartling as he was speaking, and automatically they both paused as if this agreement were one that must necessarily be made outside that enclosure.
"Very well," she said, and gave him her hand.
He took it and held it as he replied. "And that other favour? You haven't granted it yet. Will you give me at least one more chance to talk to you alone before I go?"
"Oh! you're sure to have that," she said lightly.
"But will you promise?"
"If you like," she agreed.
It was as they were walking up the garden that they decided upon the necessity for keeping the news of his departure from the rest of the family. Some sense of freedom had left them as they passed through the gates, and already Arthur was beginning to wonder at the comparative ease with which he had made his decision to leave Hartling. Now that he was back again in the garden that had become so familiar to him in the course of the last five weeks he felt again the lure of its shelter. The place was so secure, so rich with the promise of comfort and rest, of freedom from all the struggles and responsibilities of the world. Probably none of the Kenyons had ever wanted to leave it (Hubert was happy enough now that he was going to marry Dorothy Martin. If he were offered £5000 to go to Canada with her, he probably would not take it). They pretended to be imprisoned, played with the idea of having ambitions. It was a sort of boasting. No doubt they wanted their jailor to die. He stood between them and the semblance of freedom. But when he was dead and they were independent, they would almost certainly go on living there just as they were doing now. They wouldn't want to change their habits after all these years.
It was amazing how differently he saw the problem, now that he was back again within the enclosure of those protecting walls.
Nevertheless, he wrote to Somers, even giving him the time of the train by which he might be expected on the following Tuesday. He was, he thought, being rather quixotic, but he meant to keep his promise to Eleanor, and ask to be released from the one he had made to the old man. And if that release were denied, what could he do? Insist? Say calmly that he meant to go whether he were released or not? Allow the old man to regard him as an ungrateful cad? Or make Eleanor bear witness? Make a clean breast of everything and say that one or the other of them had to go, and he preferred that it should be himself, for excellent reasons? It was just possible that they might both be turned out if the old man knew that they had been plotting against him as it were. On the other hand, he might suggest that the difficulty could be overcome—in another way.
Arthur jumped to his feet and began to pace fiercely up and down his bedroom. Lord, if only that had been possible, what a difference it might have made.~ She had been kind enough to him while they were out together. He had some reason to believe that she did not, after all, really dislike him. But it was absolutely futile to hope that she would ever marry him. He was not good enough for her. She was the sort of woman who would love with all her heart and soul, if she ever loved at all. Probably she never would. There were not any men good enough for her. …
He seemed to know her infinitely better since that walk. Before that he had had a vision of her as a forlorn little child of seven, but what she had told him this afternoon gave him the material to follow her development up to the present day. He could see her as a girl of sixteen, having lessons with her governess, and being kept in comparative ignorance of the war; and again a year or two later, beginning to guess at the true significance of that great catastrophe. He had a new sense of having known her all her life. It was difficult to imagine life without her. Yet, if this affair turned out as he had every reason to expect it would, he might never see her again. …
A man was so impotent. If she did not care for him, that was the end of it. He could not make her care for him. The root of the whole trouble probably was that she despised him for staying on there in the first instance. She had classed him in her mind with all the others, a hanger-on, a weak fool who preferred to inherit money rather than to earn it! And, good God, she had been right! That was what he had been, a cursed parasite, living on a friendly host. Commensalism. Somers had guessed it too. Any one who had not been perverted by this infernal Hartling atmosphere could see it. And Eleanor, who had not been perverted, the one exception in that place, had judged him without bias, had seen him as he was. Little wonder that she had despised him. His one hope now was to prove that she had in effect misjudged him. He must tell her that he had realised, however tardily, the kind of weak fool that he had been, and he would support his confession by action. He would not wait for a week, he would go the next day. He would see her for a minute after dinner, and just announce his determination, ask her to make sure of his appointment with the old man next morning. …
Before he went, he would make an opportunity to say good-bye to her. It was a heroic measure, but the only way by which he could hope to recover her esteem.
In his bath, and while he was dressing for dinner, he deliberately took his leave of luxury. He had lived the life of a millionaire for more than five weeks; might live it, if he chose, for perhaps another five years. But he was willing, eager, to renounce it all in order that he might recover Eleanor's esteem. He would make still greater sacrifices if he could win that reward.
And, oddly enough, there was another compensation which he had not consciously sought, but which he was instantly aware of as a result of his decision—he was a free man again. As he stood and looked at his reflection in the glass before going down to dinner, he was aware of that same feeling of release that had come to him when he had made his petition on behalf of Hubert, the day before. He lifted his head with a touch of arrogance and squared his shoulders. Good God! what a damned fool he had been ever to dally with the thought of staying on indefinitely at Hartling. He was an independent man now, in a kingdom of slaves. The Kenyons, after all, were to be pitied rather than condemned. What was the good of all this luxury if you were not the captain of your own soul? Ambition, work, and independence were the only things worth living for—if you could not have love.
But if it had not been for her. …
He was so full of his new resolve and so anxious to tell Eleanor, that he completely overlooked the unusually chastened air of the dinner-table that evening. He was trying to make an appointment with Eleanor by some almost invisible signal, and she persistently avoided his eloquent stare. Only twice did she meet his eyes, and on both occasions she turned away her head almost immediately. It seemed that he had lost all that he believed he had gained at the conclusion of their walk. Yet it was impossible that anything could have happened since, to change her new opinion of him. In any case, he would see her after dinner, even if he had to follow her upstairs. She would forgive him when she heard what he had to say.
He hardly noticed that Elizabeth—who was dressed in black that evening, a colour that did not suit her—was moody and depressed, or that Miss Kenyon seemed to have temporarily lost something of her autocratic, self-contained manner. And he was far too engrossed with his own affairs to attempt any inferences from the slight indications that he could not altogether overlook. He merely assumed that they were a little duller than usual—and pitied them.
He looked up once or twice at the head of the table, turning over in his mind the various approaches by which he might most gently break his news the next morning, but the old man showed no sign of any unusual disturbance.
The moment Miss Kenyon gave her sister-in-law the signal to rise, Arthur jumped to his feet. He meant to allow no interference with his plans on this occasion. He was ready, if Miss Kenyon spoke to him, to pretend that he had not heard her. But no one intervened between him and Eleanor. They actually left the dining-room together.
She turned towards the staircase as they entered the hall, and afraid that she might run away, he began at once, "Could I speak to you for one minute? It's important. I …"
"Yes, I saw your signals at dinner," she interrupted him, none too graciously.
"Oh! did you? I'm sorry. I thought you didn't understand," he apologised. "You see, the fact is that I have decided to go, to leave here, to-morrow. I wanted to tell you, because I must see Mr Kenyon before I go."
They had reached the foot of the staircase now and she went up two stairs before she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level. Her forehead was puckered into a little anxious frown. "Why have you changed your mind?" she asked.
He was warmed to a boldness that he had not dared hitherto. "I've been thinking over all our talk this afternoon," he said, "particularly yours, and I realised how absolutely right you were in despising me for hanging on here, and I felt that I could not stay another twenty-four hours."
She stretched out her arm and rested her fingers on the magnificent width of the mahogany handrail. "Why?" she asked.
"I could not bear the thought that you despised me," he said.
"I never did," she replied gently; "only I was sorry."
He was too drunk with the vapours of his own resolve to catch the finer significance of her answer. "It's frightfully kind of you to say that," he said, "but you've made me despise myself, and anyhow I'm going. So will you ask Mr Kenyon if he can see me to-morrow morning?"
She smiled faintly at the impetuosity of his boasting.
"I'm afraid he can't," she said. "He won't be here to-morrow."
"Not here?" he repeated in astonishment, and then as the implications of that unexpected news became clearer to him, he added, "Then it's possible that I might—that we could have another walk or something?"
She smiled more openly now. "It is, just possible," she said. "If you feel that you can, after all, put off your departure for another day."
"Oh, of course, in that case!" he said eagerly, and added, "Besides, I must see him before I go. How long will he be away?"
"He'll be back to-morrow afternoon," she told him. "He's only going up to town in the car for the day. Haven't you heard?"
"Heard? What? No, I don't believe I've spoken to any one hardly since we came in. Has anything happened?"
"One of the periodical rumblings of the earthquake," she said.
He was alive now to this new issue. "Can't you tell me?" he asked.
She glanced round the hall and up the stairs before she said in a low voice, "He had a letter from Ken by the second post, a defiant letter, and rather rude. Ken's going to break away, he has borrowed the money to pay the worst of his debts, and leave enough over to pay his passage to South Africa. He knows some one who has a farm there and he's going to join him. Uncle Charles and Aunt Catherine are fearfully upset, of course, and it's one of those rare occasions when the foundations of the house begin to shake. I've only seen it happen before in the case of servants who have—well—broken away, but the effect is much the same, though the rumblings are deeper this time."
"Is he very annoyed?" Arthur asked. "He didn't seem upset at dinner."
"He? Oh, no! He's as calm as Fate," Eleanor said, "and as cruel."
"But why is he going up to town? Is he going to see Ken himself?"
She shook her head, glanced once more round the hall, and then bending towards him, whispered, "He's going to see his lawyer and alter the will. He hasn't said so, but every one knows."
Arthur pursed his mouth. "Pity I couldn't see him before he goes," he remarked. "Might save him another journey."
She looked at him with a frank approval, smiling her appreciation of his humour. "You're not afraid of him, are you?" she said.
He was afraid of nothing, as long as he could win her smiles, but he didn't brag. "There's no reason why I should be, is there?" he replied.
"Absolutely none," she said confidently. "But you may find him difficult, harder to deal with than you think. It was different with Ken. He didn't want to keep Ken. He does want to keep you. I must go now. I've a heap of letters to do for him."
"But shall I see you to-morrow?" he said, as she turned and began to ascend the shallow stairs.
She did not answer that, but when she was half-way up the second flight she looked back at him and waved her hand.
He was more than content. That last glance of hers had again approved him. He had won a measure of admiration from her by his decision. And to-morrow, he would have her to himself—possibly for the whole day. …
He was still standing at the foot of the stairs, and after a moment's hesitation he went on up to his own room. He could not stand that crowd downstairs to-night. They would be depressingly gloomy, full of horrible forebodings about the impending alterations to that untidy will. He wanted to be alone with his own glorious thoughts.