The Hoyden

by Duchess

CHAPTER XXIV.

HOW TITA PLEADS HER CAUSE WITH MARGARET; AND HOW MARGARET REBUKES HER; AND HOW STEPS ARE HEARD, AND TITA SEEKS SECLUSION BEHIND A JAPANESE SCREEN; AND WHAT COMES OF IT.

"What hour did he say he was coming?" asks Tita, looking up suddenly from the book she has been pretending to read.

"About four. I wish, dearest, you would consent to see him."

"I consent? Four, you say? And it is just three now. A whole hour before I feel his hated presence in the house. Where are you going to receive him?"

"In the small drawing-room, I suppose."

"You suppose. Margaret, is it possible you have not given directions to James? Why, he might show him in here."

"Well, even if he did," says Margaret impatiently, "I don't suppose he would do you any bodily harm. Once you saw him the ice would be broken, and——"

"We should both fall in and be drowned. It would only make matters worse, I assure you."

"It would be a change at all events, and 'variety is charming.' As it is, you have both fallen out."

"You are getting too funny for anything," says Tita, tilting her chin saucily.

"Now, if you were to do as you suggest, fall in—in love—with each other——"

"Really, Margaret, this is beneath you," says Tita, laughing in spite of herself. "No! no! no! I tell you," starting to her feet, "I'd rather die than meet him again. When you and Colonel Neilson are married——"

"Oh! as to that," says Margaret, but she colours faintly.

"I shall take a tiny cottage in the country, and a tiny maid; and
I'll have chickens, and a big dog, and a pony and trap, and——"

"A desolate hearth. No, Tita, you were not born for the old maid's joys."

"Well, I was not born to be tyrannized over, any way," says Tita, raising her arms above her head, her fingers interlaced, and yawning lightly. "And old maid has liberty, at all events."

"I don't see that mine does me much good," says Margaret ruefully.

"That's why you are going to give it up. Though anyone who could call you an old maid would be a fool. I sometimes"—wistfully— "wish you were going to be one, Meg, because then I could live with you for ever."

"Well, you shall."

"No; not I. Three is trumpery."

"There won't be three."

"I wish I had a big bet on that. I wish someone would bet me my old dear home, my Oakdean, upon that. I should be a happy girl again."

A great sadness grows within her eyes.

"Tita, you could be happy if you chose."

"You are always saying that," says Lady Rylton, looking full at her.
"But how—how can I be happy!"

"See Maurice! Make it up with him. Put an end to this foolish quarrel."

"What should I gain by agreeing to live again with a man who cares nothing for me? I tell you, Margaret, that I desire no great things. I did not expect to wring from life extraordinary joys. I have never been exorbitant in my demands. I did not even ask that Maurice should love me. I asked only that he should like me—be—be fond of me. I"—her voice beginning to tremble—"have had so few people to be fond of me; and to live with anyone, Margaret, to see him all day long, and know he cared nothing for me, that he thought me in his way, that he so hated me that he couldn't speak to me without scolding me, or saying hurtful words! Oh, no! I could not do that again."

"Maurice has been most unfortunate," says Margaret, very sadly. "Do you really believe all this of him, Tita?"

"I believe he loved Mrs. Bethune all the time," returns she simply. "And even if it be true what you say, that he does not love her now—still he does not love me either."

"And you?"

"Oh, I—I am like the 'miller of the Dee.'" She had been on the verge of tears, but now she laughs.

"'I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.'

I told you that before. Why do you persist in thinking I am in love? Such a silly phrase! At all events"—disdainfully—"I'm not in love with Maurice."

"I am afraid not, indeed," says Margaret, in a low voice. "And yet you seem to have such a capacity for loving. Me I know you love—and that old home."

"Ah yes—that! But that is gone. And soon you will be gone, too."

"Never! never!" says Margaret earnestly. "And all this is so morbid, Tita. You must rouse yourself; you know some of our old friends are coming to see me on Sunday next. You will meet them?"

"If you like." She pauses. "Is Mrs. Chichester coming?"

"Yes, I think so, and Randal Gower, and some others."

"I should like to see them very much."

She has grown quite animated.

"The only one you don't want to see, in my opinion, is your husband," says Margaret, with a little reproach.

"I want to see him quite as much as he wants to see me," says Tita. "By-the-bye, you ought to tell James about his coming. It is half-past three now."

"He's always late," says Margaret lazily.

But even as she says it, both Tita and she are conscious of the approach of a man's footstep, that assuredly is not the footstep of James.

"I told you—I told you!" cries Tita, springing to her feet, and wringing her hands. "Oh! why didn't you give some directions to James? Oh, Margaret! Oh! what shall I do? If I go out there I shall meet him face to face. Oh! why do people build rooms with only one door in them? I'm undone." She glances wildly round her, and in the far distance of this big drawing-room espies a screen. "That," gasps she, "that will do! I'll hide myself behind that. Don't keep him long, Meg darling! Hurry him off. Say you've got the cholera—any little thing like that—and get rid of him."

"Tita—you can't. It is impossible. He will probably say things, and you won't like them—and——"

"I shan't listen! I shall put my fingers in my ears. Of course"—indignantly—"I shan't listen."

"But—Tita—good gracious——"

Her other words are lost for ever. The handle of the door is turned.
Tita, indeed, has barely time to scramble behind the screen when Sir
Maurice is announced by James, who is electrified by the glance his
mistress casts at him.

"I expect I'm a little early," says Rylton, shaking hands with Margaret—apologizing in his words but not in his tone. He is of course unaware of the heart-burnings in Margaret's breast, or the apology would have been more than a mere society speech. "You are alone?"

Here poor Margaret's purgatory begins—Margaret, who is the soul of truth.

"Well, you can see!" says she, spreading out her hands and giving a comprehensive glance round her—a glance that rests as if stricken on the screen. What awful possibilities lie behind that!

"Yes, yes, of course. Yet I fancied I heard voices."

"How curious are our fancies!" says poor Margaret, taking the tone of an advanced Theosophist, even while her heart is dying within her.

"Where is Tita?" asks Rylton suddenly. To Margaret's guilty conscience the direct question sounds like an open disbelief in her former answers. But Rylton had asked it thus abruptly merely because he felt that if he lingered over it it never might be asked; and he must know. "Where is Tita?" asks he again. Where indeed!

"She is here—at least," hurriedly, almost frantically, "with me, you know; staying with me. Staying, you know."

"Yes, I know. Gone out, perhaps?"

"No, n—o. In retirement," says Margaret wretchedly. Is she listening? How can she answer him all through? If he speaks against her, what is she to do? If she has in all justice to condemn her in some little ways, will she bear it? Will she keep her fingers in her ears?

"Ah—headache, I suppose," says Rylton.

"Yes; her head aches sometimes," says Margaret, who now feels she is fast developing into a confirmed liar.

"It usen't to ache," says he.

At this Miss Knollys grows a little wild.

"Used it not?" says she. "You remember, perhaps; I don't! But I am certain she would object to being made a subject for cross-examination. If you are anxious about her health, you need not be. She is well, very well indeed. Excellently well. She seems to regret—to require—nothing."

Margaret has quite assured herself that this little speech of hers will be acceptable to the hidden form behind the screen. She feels, indeed, quite proud of it. Tita had been angry with her that last day when she had told Rylton she looked pale, but now she casts a glance at the screen, and to her horror sees that it shakes perceptibly. There is something angry in the shake of it. What is wrong now? What has she said or done?

"I am glad to hear that," says Sir Maurice, in a tone that is absolutely raging. He moves up the room, as he speaks, to the fire—a small fire, it is still a little chilly—and terribly close to the screen. Indeed, as he stoops to lift the poker and break the coals, his elbow touches the corner of it.

"Don't stand there; come over here. So bad for your complexion!" says Margaret frantically.

As Maurice is about as brown as he can be, this caution falls somewhat flat.

"It's cold enough," says he absently, standing upright, with his hands behind him. He gives himself a little shake, as men do when airing themselves before a fire in mid-winter. It is quite warm to-day, but he had "seen the fire," and—we are all children of habit. "It is wonderfully cold for this time of year," continues he, even more absently than before. He lays his hand upon the corner of the screen near him. Margaret is conscious of a vague sensation of faintness. Maurice turns to her.

"You were saying that Tita——"

Here Margaret rebels.

"Once for all, Maurice, I decline to discuss your wife," says she quickly. "Talk of anything else on earth you like—of Mr. Gladstone, the Irish question, poor Lord Tennyson, the mice in Hungary, anything—but not of Tita!"

"But why?" asks Rylton. "Has she forbidden you to mention her to me?"

"Certainly not! Why should she?"

"Why indeed? A man more barbarously treated by her than I have been—has seldom——"

Margaret's unhappy eyes once more glance towards the screen. It is shaking now—ominously.

"Of course! Of course! We all know that," says she, her eyes on the screen, her mind nowhere. She has not the least idea of the words she has chosen. She had meant only to pacify him, to avert the catastrophe if possible: she had spoken timidly, enthusiastically, fatally. The screen now seems to quiver to its fall. An earthquake has taken possession of it, apparently—an earthquake in an extremely advanced stage.

Oh, those girls, and their promises about their fingers and their ears!

"I'm sorry I can't ask you to stay, Maurice," says she hurriedly. "But—but I'm not well: I, too, have a headache—a sort of neuralgia, you know."

"You seem pretty well, however," says Sir Maurice, regarding her curiously.

"Oh, I dare say," impatiently. "But I'm not. I'm ill. I tell you this sudden attack of influenza is overpowering me, and—it's infectious, my dear Maurice. It is really. They all say so—the very cleverest doctors; and I should never forgive myself if you took it—and, besides——"

"You can't be feeling very bad," says Maurice slowly. "Your colour is all right."

"Ah! That is what is so deceptive about it," says Margaret eagerly. "One looks well, even whilst one is almost dying. I assure you these sudden attacks of—of toothache"—wildly—"are most trying. They take so much out of one."

"They must," says Maurice gravely. "So many attacks, and all endured at the same time, would shake the constitution of an annuitant. Headache, neuralgia, influenza, toothache! You have been greatly afflicted. Are you sure you feel no symptoms of hydrophobia?"

"Maurice——"

"No? So glad of that! My dear girl, why are you so anxious to get rid of me?"

"Anxious to get rid of you? What an absurd idea!"

"Well, if not that, what on earth do you mean?"

"I have told you! I have a headache."

"Like Lady Rylton. The fact is, Margaret," says he, turning upon her wrathfully, "she has bound you down not to listen to a word I can say in my own defence. The last day I was here you were very different. But I can see she has been at work since, and is fast prejudicing you against me. I call that most unfair. I don't blame you, though I think you might give half an hour to a cousin and an old friend—one who was your friend long before ever she saw you. You think the right is all on her side; but is it? Now I put it fairly to you. Is it?"

Margaret is quaking.

"My dear Maurice—I—you know how I feel for you—for"—with a frantic glance at the screen—"for both of you, but——"

"Pshaw! that is mere playing with the subject. Do you mean to say you have given up even your honest opinion to her? You must know that it is not right for a wife to refuse to live with her husband. Come"—vehemently—"you must know that."

"Yes. Yes, of course," says poor Margaret, who doesn't know on earth what she is saying.

Her eyes are riveted on that awful screen, and now she is shaken to the very core by the fact that it is evidently undergoing a second earthquake! What is to be done? How long will this last? And when the end comes, will even one of them be left alive to tell the tale?

"Look here!" says Rylton. "She won't see me, it appears; she declines to acknowledge the tie that binds us. She has plainly decided on putting me outside her life altogether. But she can't do that, you know. And"—with some vehemence—"what I wish to say is this, that if I was in fault when I married her, fancying myself in love with another woman——"

"Maurice, I entreat," says Margaret, rising, "I desire you to——"

"No; you must listen. I will not be condemned unheard. She can't have it all her own way. If I was in fault, so was she. Is it right for a woman to marry a man without one spark of love for him, with—she never concealed it—an almost open dislike to him?"

"Dislike? Maurice——"

"Well, is she not proving it now? My coming seems to be the signal for her hiding herself away in her own room. 'In retirement' you said she was, with a bad headache. Do you think"—furiously—"I can't see through her headaches? Now listen, Margaret; the case stands thus: I married her for her money, and she married me for my title. We both accepted the risk, and——"

Margaret throws up her hands. Her face grows livid, her eyes are fastened on the screen, and at this moment it goes over with a loud crash.

"It is not true! It is a lie!" says Tita, advancing into the middle of the room, her lips apart, her eyes blazing.