Chapter Seven.
Claudia was ungratefully anxious to leave Thornbury. She had been happy there, but the young expect to be happy, and the last days had made her uncomfortable. Harry said no word, and tried hard to be as he had been when hope still lived in his heart, but Claudia was annoyed when she saw him looking grave, or when his mother remarked she did not know what could be the matter with Harry.
“Perhaps he has toothache,” said Ruth Baynes, lifting her eyebrows sympathetically. “My brother Walter gets dreadfully low when he has toothache. And it was much worse when he had mumps.”
“Mumps! Oh, my dear, I hope poor Harry has not caught anything of that sort! They are in the village, and the gardener’s little girl certainly had a swollen face. Still—Harry has not complained, has he?”
“Not to me,” said Claudia, with a laugh.
Perhaps in spite of the longing to keep her near him, Harry himself was not sorry when the last day came. The old kindly companionship, even if disdainful on her part, had been sweet, and now that, too, was gone. Claudia scolded him no more, laughed at him no more, and he felt as if she had stepped far away. He blamed himself for the change, but it took the heart out of him. And the gallant effort he made to prevent those who loved him from knowing that he suffered, seemed at times more than he could successfully keep up.
Still, when the last moment came, and they all stood at the door to see Claudia and Captain Fenwick ride away together out of his life, Harry went through the worst sensation he had ever experienced. He did his best to hide it, laughed at his mothers misgivings, assuring her that nowadays it was the most common proceeding in the world, and that he meant to take Helen Arbuthnot home in the same fashion; and, instead of retiring to solitude, went straight off to the stable to doctor a lame horse. There were plenty of prosaic and unromantic details to be attended to, of which he shirked not one; the buying pigs, and deciding what should be done with an unprofitable cow, had to be talked over and arranged without impatience. After this he walked off to see the keeper’s old mother, who was very irritable with constant pain, and dearly loved to grumble against all her family to Master Harry. And no one knew how big an ache he carried in his kindly heart.
But meanwhile?
Well, meanwhile it was summer-time, and under a blue sky veiled here and there with white clouds, through lanes in which honeysuckle still ran riot, Claudia and her companion raced swiftly along, or dawdled up the many hills. He was a little surprised at her vigorous enjoyment of all about them, and, so contagious is happiness, found himself, too, making merry over the veriest trifles. Wonder broke out at last.
“You have turned me into a boy again. What magic do you use?”
“It is not I,” said Claudia merrily. “It is the air and the sky and the trees and the great simple things which we think nothing about. Why must you be a boy to feel the enchantment of them all?”
“Do you advise me, then, to go and live in a hut?”
“Oh, I don’t advise. There’s a splendid butterfly.”
She named it correctly.
“One of the girls at the college collected butterflies. I don’t do it myself because I like them too much. Look! here is a splendid bit of road for a spin. Let us race to that gate, though I shan’t have a chance.”
She dashed off, and contrived so cleverly to prevent his passing, that only at the last minute could Fenwick succeed in slipping round her.
“Only just!” she cried, waving her hand. “Oh, that was glorious! I wish we had timed ourselves.”
They raced again, teased each other, laughed, and behaved like two children on a holiday. As they went down the Huntingdon drive, Claudia gave a sigh of satisfaction.
“I’ve enjoyed it so much, every bit of it, haven’t you?”
At another time he might have answered with some compliment, but the frank appeal confused him. He was unprepared for such simple delight, in which he could not but feel he had no more special share than twenty other things about them. Claudia had looked upon him as a playfellow—nothing else.
Nor could his vanity flatter him that she leaned upon him in this entry into a world of strangers. Quite unabashed, thoroughly direct, and changed and professional to her fingers’ ends, Fenwick, with annoyance for which he could scarcely account, saw amusement growing in his cousin Lady Wilmot’s dancing eyes. When they were left alone, it broke out.
“Oh, Arthur, Arthur, now I understand!”
“You understand nothing at all,” he said roughly. There was an occasional roughness in his manner, which cynics said was what women liked. Lady Wilmot only smiled.
“Do tell her not to be quite so solemn about it all,” she said. “She is so exceedingly determined we shan’t for one moment forget what she is here for, that she is for ever flaunting her calling in one’s face. But she’s quite a nice little thing.”
“Yes,” he repeated in the same tone, “quite a nice little things—whatever that may mean.”
“Don’t be rude. You might allow for my surprise, when I had made up my mind to a middle-aged being with spectacles and an umbrella, at being confronted with this young little person. I’m very glad—at least I shall be if you can persuade her to unbend, and if Peter doesn’t make love to her.”
“As if Peter had ever eyes for any one but yourself!”
But if Lady Wilmot was astonished, Fenwick himself had odd sensations. Beginning his acquaintance with the girl with a certain amount of pique at an indifference to which he was unaccustomed, and a determination to drag her out of it, he had taken a great deal more trouble than was usual with him, and yet had failed. He knew women well enough to own that he had failed utterly, and as his vanity could never endure defeat, the consciousness made him more keen to carry out his purpose. Then came this summer afternoon in which he had seen Claudia in a new light, when something of harmony in the girl’s nature with the fresh cool simplicity of a country world, touched him as nothing had touched him for years, and carried him back to his boyish days. For the first time he felt a sharp stab of annoyance when he found that she was up again on her heroic hobby-horse, and that Lady Wilmot’s eyes were brimming over with amusement.
“Good heavens!” he said to himself savagely, “I must speak to her, prevent her from making such a fool of herself. When she’s out of this preposterous nonsense she’s charming, but where are her eyes, where’s her sense of the ridiculous?”
Nor did he ask himself why Claudia’s folly should disturb him.
He stopped her the next morning in a corridor which served for a picture-gallery. She had on a white dress, and, with her hands clasped behind her, was standing looking at the portrait of a young girl.
“Who is it by?” she asked. “I don’t know about pictures, but this strikes me as very good.”
“Romney, I believe,” he said; and then abruptly, “Look here, you and I are old friends.”
“Old friends!” Claudia repeated, opening her eyes.
“Older than anybody here, at any rate. And I suppose you’ll own that I’ve knocked about the world more than you? What on earth makes you cram all these people about your business here?”
“I think you are rather rude,” she said, flushing. “If you were in my position, you would understand.”
“Your position! We’re most of us in some sort of position, but we don’t go talking about it all day long. It’s just as if you were ashamed of it.”
“Now I am sure you are rude,” Claudia cried, still redder. “Ashamed, indeed! But I don’t choose to appear as if I were merely a guest. That is not fair upon my employers. I am a professional, a working woman; I am not going to be paid for just driving about and amusing myself like other girls, and unless I make it quite clear, they will insist upon thinking that is what I expect.”
“Of course,” he said, still roughly, “I know well enough what you have in your head, but you needn’t be always cramming it down people’s throats. State the fact, if you insist upon it, and then leave it alone.”
Claudia felt this to be very disagreeable indeed. She said slowly—
“Have you done?”
“Naturally you’re offended,” he went on, with a sudden softening of his voice. “But if you think it fairly over, I believe I may get you to own that it can’t have been very pleasant for me to speak?”
Her face cleared, and she looked frankly at him.
“I suppose it was not,” she allowed. “Did you do it on my account, or because you disliked any one you had to do with being laughed at?” But before he had recovered from this rebuke, she added with a certain sweetness which was noticeable in her at times, “Still, you must not think that I am angry. I suppose I was for a moment, but it was foolish of me, because you were right, quite right, to say out what was in your mind. And I dare say, too, that you are right in what you think. I suppose it seems so much more important to me than to them all—not on my own account, but because we feel we are making a beginning—that I have let myself talk too much about it.”
“So that you forgive me?” he said, quite humbly for him.
She laughed.
“I forgive you. I dare say that by-and-by I shall have reached the height of being even grateful. But now you must let me go, because if I am not to talk I must work all the harder.”
“You can always talk to me,” he said eagerly.
“Oh no,” she said, escaping, with a shake of her head. “I must break myself of a bad habit.”
If Claudia had been mortified by his plain speaking, there was no doubt that she took the lesson to heart. There was no more of that somewhat masterful enthusiasm with which she had up to this time indulged her hearers. She became, instead, extremely reticent, and not an allusion to the college or to professional duties passed her lips. Fenwick was half pleased, half vexed, because this was not the Claudia he knew. He found himself thinking of her with persistence which amazed him. He could not flatter himself that she was angry with him, but would have welcomed her anger as proof that in some way or another he affected her. Why did he not? He raged at the thought of caring that he should, but he could not deny her indifference.
The days went by; Claudia still kept her word. She went quietly about the work she had in hand, but would not talk of it—even to Fenwick. This annoyed him, and one evening he threw himself into a chair by her side, and told her so.
“Women always go into extremes,” he grumbled, when he had made his complaint.
Claudia looked at him and laughed.
“I never knew any one so difficult to please,” she said. “I thought I was carrying out my lessons.”
“So you are,” he replied impatiently, “but you needn’t practise your lessons upon everybody. I ought to be an exception.”
“Why?”
“Because I am not a stranger like these other people.”
“Oh,” said Claudia, laughing still more unfeelingly; “I never knew any one make quite so much out of a fortnight before! Wasn’t it a fortnight that you had known me?”
“I believe I have known you always,” he returned hardily. “Days—weeks—what have they to do with the matter?”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Uncompromising truth. Don’t you see that it gives me the power of understanding you?”
This is an appeal which rarely fails with women, and Fenwick knew how to accentuate it by fixing his dark eyes upon the girl, and flinging an intensity of will into his gaze. She merely lifted her eyebrows.
“I dare say. I don’t think any one ever found me mysterious.”
He was angrily aware that she spoke truly. There were few complexities in her character to baffle any one, but there was for him a baffling directness and simplicity against which his efforts beat themselves in vain. She met them with an indifference which perpetually incited him to break it down.
Lady Wilmot was a little disappointed that Claudia did not carry out the promise of her first hours, for she was a small lady who liked nothing so well as amusement, and had foreseen a rich supply. With the other two or three who were staying there the girl was popular in her own way, which, however, kept her apart except at meals and in the evening. In truth, although she had taken Fenwick’s hint both lightly and good-humouredly, it gave her the sort of shock one gets by running full tilt against a wall. She had been anxious to impress those about her with the gravity of woman’s work, to see that they put it on a level with man’s, to shake off the faintest accusation of frivolity; and, to accomplish this end she was prepared to be pointed at and scorned. With such lofty aspirations nothing could be well more humiliating than to find herself considered a bore. Here lay the point of Fenwick’s moral, it was from this he wanted to save her. “A bore, a bore, a bore!” She scourged herself with the taunt, and vowed there should be no more of it, for to the young, ridicule is intolerable.
But the resolution made her feel curiously lonely. The girls at the college, mostly reformers, all enthusiasts, largely impressed with the part they had to play, and occasionally in more open revolt, incited and encouraged each other over their work, which seemed to them of supreme importance. When Claudia came out of this atmosphere it still clung about her, so that she babbled of it gravely, as she had babbled to her companions. Now she was sure she had been a bore, and the thought stung. It made her, also, silent and reserved, although this was so unlike her nature that she only got at it by sheer force of will. Fenwick had certainly offered himself as sympathetic, but she was shrewd enough to reflect, “What he warned me against, he feels himself. He is ready to talk because I am a girl and not bad-looking, but only on that account, not because he really cares.” And then thought flew to Harry Hilton, not with the wish that she had given him a different answer, but with absolute certainty that he would never have considered her a bore.