IV
AFTER lunch we all sat together on the lawn. Yes, life was there, and the instinct for life, and for new life. Poor Sir Thomas’s brooding ghost had taken its departure. I was glad, but the evidence of my eyes made me also uneasy. The situation was not developing on easy lines.
With his ears Fullard listened to Beatrice Gladwin; with his eyes he watched the girl who was to have been her all-powerful stepmother, who was now her most humble dependant. I saw it—I, a man. Were the girls themselves unconscious? The idea is absurd. If anybody were unconscious, it was Fullard himself; or, at least, he thought his predicament undetected. I suggested to Nettie that she and I might take a walk: a high priest has occasionally to do things like that when there is no chaperon about. She refused, not meekly now, but almost pertly. Beatrice raised her eyes for a moment, looked at her, and coloured ever so slightly. I think we may date the declaration of war from that glance. The captain did not see it: he was lighting a cigarette. None the less, the next moment he rose and proposed to accompany me himself. That did almost as well—how far I had got into the situation!—and I gladly acquiesced. We left the two ladies together, or, to be precise, just separating; they both, it appeared, had letters to write.
I should say at once that Spencer Fullard was one of the most honest men I have ever known (besides being one of the best-looking). If he came fortune-hunting, it was because he believed that pursuit to be his duty—duty to self, to ancestors, and, above all, to descendants. But, in truth, when he came first, it had not been in unwilling obedience to duty’s spur. He had liked Miss Gladwin very much; he had paid her attentions, even flirted with her; and, in the end, he liked her very much still. But there is a thing different from liking—a thing violent, sudden, and obliterating. It makes liking cease to count.
We talked little on our visit to the home farm. I took occasion once more to point out Miss Gladwin’s efficiency. Fullard fidgeted: he did not care about efficiency in women—that seemed plain. I ventured to observe that her investment of money on the estate was likely to pay well; he seemed positively uncomfortable. After these conversational failures, I waited for him. We were on our way back before he accepted the opening.
“I say, Foulkes,” he broke out suddenly, “do you suppose Miss Tyler’s going to stay here permanently?”
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t she?”
He swished at the nettles as he made his next contribution to our meagre conversation. “But Beatrice Gladwin will marry some day soon, I expect.”
“Well?”
I was saying little, but at this point Fullard went one better. He just cocked his eye at me, leaving me to read his meaning as I best could.
“In that case, of course, she’d be sent away,” said I, smiling.
“Kicked out?” He grumbled the question, half under his breath.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Everything would be done kindly, no doubt.”
“Not fair on the chap, either,” he remarked after some moments. I think that my mind supplied the unspoken part of his conversation quite successfully: he was picturing the household à trois; he himself was, in his mind’s eye, “the chap,” and under the circumstances he thought “the chap” ought not to be exposed to temptation. I agreed, but kept my agreement, and my understanding, to myself.
“What appalling bad luck that poor little girl’s had!”
“One of them had to have very bad luck,” I reminded him. “Sir Thomas contrived that.”
He started a little. He had forgotten the exceedingly bad luck which once had threatened Miss Gladwin, the girl he had come to woo. The captain’s state of feeling was, in fact, fairly transparent. I was sorry for him—well, for all of them—because he certainly could not afford to offer his hand to Nettie Tyler.
Somewhere on the way back from the home farm I lost Captain Spencer Fullard. Miss Tyler’s letters must have been concise; there was the gleam of a white frock, dashed here and there with splashes of black, in the park. Fullard said he wanted more exercise, and I arrived alone on the lawn, where my hostess sat beside the tea-table. Feeling guilty for another’s sin, as one often does, I approached shamefacedly.
She gave me tea, and asked, with a businesslike abruptness which I recognised as inherited, “What are they saying about me?”
That was Gladwin all over! To say not a word for twelve months, because for twelve months she had not cared; then to blurt it out! Because she wanted light? Obviously that was the reason—the sole reason. She had not cared before; now something had occurred to make her think, to make her care, to make the question of her dealings with Miss Tyler important. I might have pretended not to understand, but there was a luxury in dealing plainly with so fine a plain-dealer; I told her the truth without shuffling.
“On the whole, it’s considered that you would be doing the handsome thing in giving her something,” I answered, sipping my tea.
She appreciated the line I took. She had expected surprise and fencing; it amused and pleased her to meet with neither. She was in the mood (by the way, we could see the black-dashed white frock and Fullard’s manly figure a quarter of a mile away) to meet frankness with its fellow.
“She never put in a word for me,” she said, smiling. “With father, I mean.”
“She doesn’t understand business,” I pleaded.
“I’ve been expected to sympathise with her bad luck!”
So had I—by the captain, half-an-hour before. But I did not mention it.
“The Bittleton Club thinks I ought to—to do something?”
I laughed at her taking our club as the arbiter. She had infused a pretty irony into her question.
“It does, Miss Gladwin.” My answer maintained the ironical note.
“Then I will,” said she, with a highly delusive appearance of simplicity.
I could not quite make her out, but it came home to me that her secret resentment against Nettie Tyler was very bitter.
She spoke again in a moment: “A word from her would have gone a long way with father.”
“That’s all in the past, isn’t it?” I murmured soothingly.
“The past!” She seemed to throw doubt on the existence of such a thing.
The captain’s manly figure and the neat little shape in white and black were approaching us. The stress of feeling has to be great before it prevents sufferers from turning up to tea. Miss Gladwin glanced toward her advancing guests, smiled, and relighted the spirit-lamp under the kettle. I suppose I was looking thoughtful, for the next moment she said, “Rather late in the day to do anything? Is that what’s in your mind? Will they say that?”
“How can I tell? Your adherents say you’ve been like sisters.”
“I never had a sister younger and prettier than myself,” said she. She waved her hand to the new arrivals, now close on us. “I nearly had a stepmother like that, though,” she added.
I did not like her at that moment; but is anybody attractive when he is fighting hard for his own? Renunciation is so much more picturesque. She was fighting—or preparing to fight. I had suddenly realised the position, for all that the garden was so peaceful, and spring was on us, and Nettie’s new-born laugh rang light across the grass, so different from the cry we once had heard from her lips in that place.
Beatrice Gladwin looked at me with a suddenly visible mockery in her dark eyes. She had read my thoughts, and she was admitting that she had. She was very “hard.” Fullard was perfectly right. Yet I think that if she had been alone at that moment she might have cried. That was just an impression of mine; really she gave no tangible ground for it, save in an odd constraint of her mouth. The next moment she laughed.
“I like a fight to be a fair fight,” she said, and looked steadily at me for a moment. She raised her voice and called to them: “Come along; the tea’s getting cold.” She added to me, “Come to my room at ten to-morrow, please.”
The rest of the evening she was as much like velvet as it was in a Gladwin to be. But I waited. I wanted to know how she meant to arrange her fair fight. She wanted one. A sportsman, after all, you see.