Chapter Twenty Five.
Fire and Cold Water.
Wareham was met in the hall by Lord Milborough—thanked for coming. They went up the broad staircase together.
“The first gong has sounded, and there’s nobody in the drawing-room,” his host explained. “You’ll find friends here, I hope. Colonel and Mrs Martyn.”
He paused. Wareham did not feel the necessity for speaking.
“Lady and Miss Dalrymple, and half-a-dozen others.”
The half-dozen others multiplied before dinner. The great drawing-room with its fine Gainsboroughs looked cheerfully full. Lady Fanny welcomed Wareham warmly, and put a dozen questions about her friends.
“You saw them yesterday?”
“And am the bearer of lost property.”
“My thimble! Thank you a thousand times. Sad to say, I had never missed it; but I must not let Millie know that, or I shall be scolded for my idleness. Oh, if you had only persuaded them to come with you!” She hoped that Wareham’s heart echoed the wish, and would have been mightily disappointed could she have peeped at it. Where was Anne? Not yet in the room. Mrs Martyn, however, smiled at him from a sofa, and he was obliged to seat himself by her side, and to endure a characteristic greeting.
“I hope you don’t object, Mr Wareham; but it almost gave me a shock to hear you were coming. I knew the sight of you would bring back that nightmare time at Bergen.”
“Did you mind it so much?”
“How can you ask? I tell Lord Milborough he saved my life, for if the yacht had not been there, I might have hung myself. That poor young man! You never ought to have told him to come out. It wasn’t fair on us.”
Wareham sat mute. She glanced at him, and played with her great fan.
“And now you have arrived, I suppose, to see the next act of the play?”
He inquired what that was to be.
“You don’t know? Then I shan’t enlighten you. This is a good house, isn’t it? with capabilities. And the pictures are good. There are one or two smaller and extremely choice in the boudoir opening out of this room. Ah, Anne is coming from it at this minute.”
Anne it was, followed by Lord Milborough; Anne in soft draperies of white and yellow, here and there flash of diamonds, brilliant as Wareham had never seen her before. She came towards him, and he rose.
“You are to take me in to dinner,” she said smilingly.
“Fortunate I!”
Another man presented himself.
“Not to-night, Mr Orpington. Go and ask Lady Fanny to effect an exchange between you and Mr Wareham.”
“It seems that I am indebted even more than I knew,” said Wareham, in a low voice, as they proceeded to the dining-room.
“It is my rule to resist tyranny. What can be so odious as to be handed over for two hours to a man with whom you have nothing in common?”
Others noticed the act. As they passed Lord Milborough’s chair, he murmured—
“Queens command.”
Anne took no notice. As soon as they were seated, she said to Wareham—
“Now for your apology.”
“My apology?”
“I wrote, and you did not bestow upon me so much as a line. Were you afraid that I should trade with your autograph?”
“Folly is not yet quite rampant in man. I answered by obeying.”
She turned a little towards him.
“It is not a bad house to stay in. One has one’s liberty.” The next moment she added—“Do you know my step-mother?”
“No.”
“She is there—in black and green. Black hair as well. You need not murmur inarticulate admiration, for we do not love each other.”
“That does not make her the less handsome.”
“To women it does. Where a woman dislikes she cannot admire. Probably you know most of the other people?”
“No. I see Lord Arthur Crosse next Lady Dalrymple.”
Anne let her eyes rest reflectively upon the two persons he named, without answering the remark except by a slight nod. Presently, however, she said—
“Do you think he will marry her? The question interests me more than it should, for you know that we are in a measure bound together. My father ruled that I was to be dependent upon her until I married—or she. I believe our old lawyer got that last clause put in out of sheer good-will to me, for my father had faith in her perpetual tears. He loved me, too, but he tried to see too far. I am not sure that a will is ever a just thing. The dead, should they control the living?” She was unconscious how closely Wareham’s thoughts flew with hers. He said—
“They must, while men have hearts. Made as we are, it is impossible to refuse what the dying ask.”
“What they ask?” repeated Anne, lifting her eyebrows. “I was talking of what they command. The most undecided of men becomes an irrevocable force by the mere act of dying.”
“There are other forces besides that of law,” Wareham persisted. “A wish may bind as tightly as a will.”
He was reminded of an old trick of Anne’s which he had almost forgotten, when she threw him a glance between half-closed lids. But the lady on his other side addressed a remark to him, and Anne took the opportunity to talk to her neighbour. Wareham saw Lady Fanny looking at them with what he supposed to be surprise at the audacity which had changed the order of the dinner, or, rather, the diners; of other thoughts of hers he was unsuspicious. By and by Anne addressed him again.
“Are you the typical Englishman, only happy when you are killing something?”
He broke into sturdy disclaimer.
“You mean because I have come to shoot? I like the open air and the walking; as for results, I am absolutely indifferent.”
“But you go out with them to-morrow?” He said yes, and added quickly, without looking at her—
“Why else am I here?”
“True. Why else?” Anne said, speaking deliberately, and nibbling an almond. “To tell the truth, I thought it probable the inducement might not be sufficient. That was why I wrote.”
The answer “Your summons brought me,” rushed to his lips, and had to be driven back. He only ventured on, “And I have not thanked you,” and dashed in another direction. “Colonel Martyn looks almost happy. I expect this life is very congenial to him.”
“Nothing could be more so. He is out from morning to night, and can tell you the history of every hit and every miss, chapter and verse. Norway was wasted time in his life.”
“He has more heart than his wife,” said Wareham bluntly.
“You were speaking to her just now. Has that caused your criticism?”
“Not that more than another, but it did not change my impression.”
“I suspect that to change would always cost you something,” said Anne, smiling.
He was on the watch against a personal note, and held himself woodenly irresponsive. But the fretting consciousness of being tongue-tied whenever he was with her, of being forced into the condition of a surface against which a match was struck in vain, worried his nerves into irritation. More than once he thought that Anne glanced at him with surprise at his dullness, or might it be his coldness. This seemed hardly possible to him, conscious as he was of a fire within which had to be kept down by liberal sluicing with cold water. It was delight to be near her, yet torture, and he told himself that he had been a fool to come. Yet when the men were left in the room after dinner it had become a desert.
The evening might have been blissful.
Opportunity was there, could he have grasped her. Once or twice, it is true, Lord Milborough succeeded in monopolising Anne; but there was scarcely a minute when Wareham was not aware that the privilege might have been his, had he sought it.
Anne’s extreme beauty, the brilliant beauty which belongs to night, the attraction she undoubtedly was bent on exercising, made his brain dizzy. As they parted in the hall, she said reproachfully—
“So you desert us for the whole of to-morrow!”
“Thank goodness!” said a voice behind.
“Discontented men hanging about the whole of the day would be unendurable.”
It was Mrs Martyn. Anne laughed good-humouredly.
“I don’t know your discontented men.”
She was told to wait until experience had been broadened by marriage, and rated with prophecies all the way up the stairs. At Mrs Martyn’s door she lingered, and finally entered, dropping into a deep chair near the fire. Blanche dismissed her maid, and stood by the mantelpiece, unfastening her bracelets.
“The house has capabilities,” she said, “and you may make it charming.”
Anne stared.
“My dear, you don’t suppose that I am blind and deaf? Of course, we all know that you can marry Lord Milborough when you please. Why pretend?”
“What do you expect me to say?” said Anne coolly.
“Not the usual stock commonplaces.”
“It is hard to be original when one has nothing to say; harder, perhaps, when one has. I give it up. Commonplace or not, I assure you Lord Milborough has not asked me to marry him, so that I have had no opportunity of—”
“Accepting him?” said Mrs Martyn eagerly.
“Giving him an answer.”
“You are an adept, my dear, in holding a man at arm’s length, or drawing him nearer as you please!”
Anne’s eyes were charged with anger.
“Blanche!”
“Can you deny it? Every now and then you land yourself in a scrape, as with that poor young fellow. Anne, tell me”—with a change of voice she leaned forward curiously—“if he had lived, what would you have done?”
Anne glanced at her, and did not at first answer. She lay back in the chair, her dark head resting against the cushion, the flicker of the fire catching a diamond cluster which nestled in her hair. Presently she said slowly—
“I don’t know. I believe he might have swept me into marrying him.”
“Is that the secret?”
“I feel like Samson—as foolish perhaps in breathing it—but the man who marries me must do it quickly, give me no time to find out that I hate him, or to change my mind. If I see him hesitate, he is lost.”
“You want a stronger will than your own?” Mrs Martyn said in surprise. “What a dangerous wish!”
“I want my eyes bandaged, like a shying horse,” said Anne, smiling at her own simile. “Then I might take the leap. Otherwise I see too much, and imagination refuses to trot along meekly gazing at the one side of the subject which is presented to me.”
“It is a pity you did not live in old days. A border raid or a swoop of pirates might have given you the wooing you desire.”
Anne agreed.
“No time for hesitation.”
Mrs Martyn remarked that Thorpe would be more to her own liking than an old Scotch stronghold. Anne got up.
“Ah, don’t weary me with talk of it!”
“I believe, after all, you are like Samson, and have not told me the truth at all. What you really want is a struggle. You conquer too easily.”
Anne stood considering.
“That is only the first act of the drama,” she said at last. “I hold to what I have said. No more questions. Good-night.”
As her maid was brushing her hair, she asked whether the Mr Wareham who had arrived that evening was not the same gentleman who had come to their rescue in that dreadful accident when they were so nearly killed? Anne laughed.
“Your memory is so creative, Watkins, that you add fresh horrors whenever you allude to that day. Yes, it was Mr Wareham with whom I walked to Oakwood.”
“How you could, ma’am! My legs wouldn’t have carried me.”
“They must, if the young farmer hadn’t been there. Did he tell you Mr Wareham’s name?”
“Yes, ma’am. And that he was staying at Sir Michael Forbes’.”
“Anything more?” asked Anne indifferently.
“He was a great friend of the family, Mr Smith said, and down there a great deal. There was some talk of he and Miss Forbes making a match of it. But people are so ready to talk!”
“They are!” Anne agreed with a smile. She sent Watkins away, and sat before the fire staring at a cheerfully blazing log, and bent on investigations. Mrs Martyn’s rather broad statements were not required to enlighten her as to the fact that a crisis in her life approached, and for once she did not know how to deal with it. A year ago—six months ago—she would have known very well; then there came a hitherto unknown stirring in her heart, not love, but liking, for Hugh. It amused her so much to find herself at last the sport of fancy, that she caught at the diversion, meaning to break away from the mischievous elf when she pleased. But that strange weakness of her nature which she had confessed to Mrs Martyn, that yielding to a dominating impetuosity, carried her further than she intended. She was on the verge before she knew, she did not love him well enough to take the plunge, yet liked him so much that her retreat had to be cowardly.
Moreover, she had shocked her world, and felt her kingdom totter. To meet Wareham at this moment was to be irresistibly impelled to charm. Conquer him, and she was once more queen—at least in her own estimation. She found balm to her wounded vanity in re-asserting power.
Then she was puzzled. Convinced that to a certain extent she had succeeded, she was met by a wall of reserve, tried to get round it, to break it down; failed, and stood piqued and revolving. Even when she had to her own satisfaction penetrated the cause, it displeased her, for though she had never felt a deep love, she insisted that to be true it must over-ride friendship. Difficulty and displeasure together attracted her to Wareham the more, and when Hugh died, her thoughts crowned him for his fidelity; the more readily, since it could no longer hamper her. The verdict upon her that she was heartless she had accepted with a jest, and quoted the world, but it had secretly stung her, because she was suspicious of its truth. But her feelings towards Wareham relieved her, for something had awakened in her different from what she had hitherto experienced. She told herself that to marry him she might be ready to give up a good deal—Thorpe, for instance—and she closed her eyes, recalling his face, his voice, the strength of his mouth, which had always fascinated her. Meeting him at Firleigh, she had expected more than he gave: as it did not come, she supposed that he was waiting for a decent interval to elapse, or perhaps trusted to that second interview which Sir Hugh’s death frustrated.
But now, now she had cast her die. Only by dint of ingenious management of Lord Milborough had she gained the invitation. Nothing at Bergen had raised his suspicions, and when he consulted her as to the people who should be asked, Wareham was indifferently suggested. A man of note.
“Not much in my line,” said Lord Milborough, whereupon her “But perhaps in mine,” alarmed him, lest she should think her tastes would not have full play. He was asked and was there. The next two days must decide. For that time she believed she could hold back her host. In that time she would take care that Wareham had his opportunity. She did not acknowledge herself to be won, but owned that he might win her. If he did not—then farewell, hearts and lovers. There remained Thorpe.