§7
So you see under what excitement Mr. Brumley came down to Black Strand.
Luck was with him at first and he forced the defence with ridiculous ease.
“Lady Harman, sir, is not a Tome,” said Snagsby.
“Ah!” said Mr. Brumley, with all the assurance of a former proprietor, “then I’ll just have a look round the garden,” and was through the green door in the wall and round the barn end before Snagsby’s mind could function. That unfortunate man went as far as the green door in pursuit and then with a gesture of despair retreated to the pantry and began cleaning all his silver to calm his agonized spirit. He could pretend perhaps that Mr. Brumley had never rung at the front door at all. If not——
Moreover Mr. Brumley had the good fortune to find Lady Harman quite unattended and pensive upon the little seat that Euphemia had placed for the better seeing of her herbaceous borders.
“Lady Harman!” he said rather breathlessly, taking both her hands with an unwonted assurance and then sitting down beside her, “I am so glad to see you. I came down to see you—to see if I couldn’t be of any service to you.”
“It’s so kind of you to come,” she said, and her dark eyes said as much or more. She glanced round and he too glanced round for Sir Isaac.
“You see,” he said. “I don’t know.... I don’t want to be impertinent.... But I feel—if I can be of any service to you.... I feel perhaps you want help here. I don’t want to seem to be taking advantage of a situation. Or making unwarrantable assumptions. But I want to assure you—I would willingly die—if only I could do anything.... Ever since I first saw you.”
He said all this in a distracted way, with his eyes going about the garden for the possible apparition of Sir Isaac, and all the time his sense of possible observers made him assume an attitude as though he was engaged in the smallest of small talk. Her colour quickened at the import of his words, and emotion, very rich and abundant emotion, its various factors not altogether untouched perhaps by the spirit of laughter, lit her eyes. She doubted a little what he was saying and yet she had anticipated that somehow, some day, in quite other circumstances, Mr. Brumley might break into some such strain.
“You see,” he went on with a quality of appeal in his eyes, “there’s so little time to say things—without possible interruption. I feel you are in difficulties and I want to make you understand——We——Every beautiful woman, I suppose, has a sort of right to a certain sort of man. I want to tell you—I’m not really presuming to make love to you—but I want to tell you I am altogether yours, altogether at your service. I’ve had sleepless nights. All this time I’ve been thinking about you. I’m quite clear, I haven’t a doubt, I’ll do anything for you, without reward, without return, I’ll be your devoted brother, anything, if only you’ll make use of me....”
Her colour quickened. She looked around and still no one appeared. “It’s so kind of you to come like this,” she said. “You say things—But I have felt that you wanted to be brotherly....”
“Whatever I can be,” assured Mr. Brumley.
“My situation here,” she said, her dark frankness of gaze meeting his troubled eyes. “It’s so strange and difficult. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know—what I want to do....”
“In London,” said Mr. Brumley, “they think—they say—you have been taken off—brought down here—to a sort of captivity.”
“I have,” admitted Lady Harman with a note of recalled astonishment in her voice.
“If I can help you to escape——!”
“But where can I escape?”
And one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. Of course there was Mrs. Sawbridge, but Lady Harman felt that her mother’s disposition to lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house at Bournemouth did not attract her. Yet what other wall in all the world was there for Lady Harman to set her back against? During the last few days Mr. Brumley’s mind had been busy with the details of impassioned elopements conducted in the most exalted spirit, but now in the actual presence of the lady these projects did in the most remarkable manner vanish.
“Couldn’t you,” he said at last, “go somewhere?” And then with an air of being meticulously explicit, “I mean, isn’t there somewhere, where you might safely go?”
(And in his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had halted suddenly and stayed her mule. In his dream because he was a man of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a train de luxe. “Look,” he had said, “below there,—Italy!—the country you have never seen before.”)
“There’s nowhere,” she answered.
“Now where?” asked Mr. Brumley, “and how?” with the tone and something of the gesture of one who racks his mind. “If you only trust yourself to me——Oh! Lady Harman, if I dared ask it——”
He became aware of Sir Isaac walking across the lawn towards them....
The two men greeted each other with a reasonable cordiality. “I wanted to see how you were getting on down here,” said Mr. Brumley, “and whether there was anything I could do for you.”
“We’re getting on all right,” said Sir Isaac with no manifest glow of gratitude.
“You’ve altered the old barn—tremendously.”
“Come and see it,” said Sir Isaac. “It’s a wing.”
Mr. Brumley remained seated. “It was the first thing that struck me, Lady Harman. This evidence of Sir Isaac’s energy.”
“Come and look over it,” Sir Isaac persisted.
Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman rose together.
“One’s enough to show him that,” said Sir Isaac.
“I was telling Lady Harman how much we missed her at Lady Viping’s, Sir Isaac.”
“It was on account of the drains,” Sir Isaac explained. “You can’t—it’s foolhardy to stay a day when the drains are wrong, dinners or no dinners.”
“You know I was extremely sorry not to come to Lady Viping’s. I hope you’ll tell her. I wrote.”
But Mr. Brumley didn’t remember clearly enough to make any use of that.
“Everybody naturally is sorry on an occasion of that sort,” said Sir Isaac. “But you come and see what we’ve done in that barn. In three weeks. They couldn’t have got it together in three months ten years ago. It’s—system.”
Mr. Brumley still tried to cling to Lady Harman.
“Have you been interested in this building?” he asked.
“I still don’t understand the system of the corridor,” she said, rising a little belatedly to the occasion. “I will come.”
Sir Isaac regarded her for a moment with a dubious expression and then began to explain the new method of building with large prepared units and shaped pieces of reinforced concrete instead of separate bricks that Messrs. Prothero & Cuthbertson had organized and which had enabled him to create this artistic corridor so simply. It was a rather uncomfortable three-cornered conversation. Sir Isaac addressed his exposition exclusively to Mr. Brumley and Mr. Brumley made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring Lady Harman, and Lady Harman made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring herself, into a position in the conversation.
Their eyes met, the glow of Mr. Brumley’s declarations remained with them, but neither dared risk any phrase that might arouse Sir Isaac’s suspicions or escape his acuteness. And when they had gone through the new additions pretty thoroughly—the plumbers were still busy with the barn bathroom—Sir Isaac asked Mr. Brumley if there was anything more he would like to see. In the slight pause that ensued Lady Harman suggested tea. But tea gave them no opportunity of resuming their interrupted conversation, and as Sir Isaac’s invincible determination to shadow his visitor until he was well off the premises became more and more unmistakable,—he made it quite ungraciously unmistakable,—Mr. Brumley’s inventiveness failed. One thing came to him suddenly, but it led to nothing of any service to him.
“But I heard you were dangerously ill, Lady Harman!” he cried. “Lady Beach-Mandarin called here——”
“But when?” asked Lady Harman, astonished over the tea-things.
“But you know she called!” said Mr. Brumley and looked in affected reproach at Sir Isaac.
“I’ve not been ill at all!”
“Sir Isaac told her.”
“Told her I was ill!”
“Dangerously ill. That you couldn’t bear to be disturbed.”
“But when, Mr. Brumley?”
“Three days ago.”
They both looked at Sir Isaac who was sitting on the music stool and eating a piece of tea-cake with a preoccupied air. He swallowed and then spoke thoughtfully—in a tone of detached observation. Nothing but a slight reddening of the eyes betrayed any unusual feeling in him.
“It’s my opinion,” he said, “that that old lady—Lady Beach-Mandarin I mean—doesn’t know what she’s saying half the time. She says—oh! remarkable things. Saying that for example!”
“But did she call on me?”
“She called. I’m surprised you didn’t hear. And she was all in a flurry for going on.... Did you come down, Mr. Brumley, to see if Lady Harman was ill?”
“That weighed with me.”
“Well,—you see she isn’t,” said Sir Isaac and brushed a stray crumb from his coat....
Mr. Brumley was at last impelled gateward and Sir Isaac saw him as far as the high-road.
“Good-bye!” cried Mr. Brumley with excessive amiability.
Sir Isaac with soundless lips made a good-bye like gesture.
“And now,” said Sir Isaac to himself with extreme bitterness, “now to see about getting a dog.”
“Bull mastiff?” said Sir Isaac developing his idea as he went back to Lady Harman. “Or perhaps a Thoroughly Vicious collie?”
“How did that chap get in?” he demanded. “What had he got to say to you?”
“He came in—to look at the garden,” said Lady Harman. “And of course he wanted to know if I had been well—because of Lady Viping’s party. And I suppose because of what you told Lady Beach-Mandarin.”
Sir Isaac grunted doubtfully. He thought of Snagsby and of all the instructions he had given Snagsby. He turned about and went off swiftly and earnestly to find Snagsby....
Snagsby lied. But Sir Isaac was able to tell from the agitated way in which he was cleaning his perfectly clean silver at that unseasonable hour that the wretched man was lying.