Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre

by Hugh Walpole

XIII

They had gone but the girl's fear remained. It was there as truly as the two figures had been and its reality was stronger than their reality.

Harkness had the sense of having been caught, and it was exactly as though now, as he stood alone there in the gallery staring down into the room, some Imp had touched him on the shoulder, crying, "Now you're in for it! Now you're in for it! The situation has got you now."

He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency.

They had chosen that room because there was some one watching their every movement and they had had only a few moments. The child—for surely she could not be more—had almost driven her companion into that two minutes' conversation, and Harkness could realise how desperate she must have been to have taken such a course.

But after all it was no business of his! Girls married every day men whom they did not love and, although apparently in this case, the man also did not love her and they were both of them in evil plight, still that too had happened before and nothing very terrible had come of it.

It was no business of his, and yet he did wish, all the same, that he could get the ring of the girl's voice out of his ears. He had never been able to bear the sight, sound or even inference of any sort of cruelty to helpless humans or to animals. Perhaps because he was so frantic a coward himself about physical pain! And yet not altogether that. He had on several occasions taken risks of pretty savage pain to himself in order to save a horse a beating or a dog a kicking. Nevertheless, those had been spontaneous emotions roused at the instant; there was something lingering, a sad and tragic echo, in the voice that was still with him.

The very pathos of the room that he was in—the lingering of so many old notes that had been rung and rung again, notes of anticipation, triumph, disappointment, resignation, made this fresh, living sound the harder to escape.

By Jupiter, the child was frightened—that was the final ringing of it upon Harkness's heart and soul. But he was going to have his life sufficiently full were he to step in and rescue every girl frightened by matrimony! Rescue! No, there was no question of rescue. It wasn't, once again, his affair. But he did wish that he could just take her hand and tell her not to worry, that it would all come right in the end. But would it? He hadn't at all cared for the fragment of countenance that fellow had shown to him, and he had liked still less the tone of his voice, cold, unfeeling, hard. Poor child! And suddenly the thought of his Browning's "Duchess" came to him:

I was the man the Duke spoke to:
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too;
So, here's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!

Well, here was a tale with which he had definitely nothing to do. Let him remember that. He was here in a most beautiful place for a holiday—that was his purpose, that his intention—what were these people to him or he to them?

Nevertheless the voice lingered in his ear, and to be rid of it he left the room. He stepped carefully down the wooden steps, and then at the bottom of them, under the dark lee of the gallery, he paused. He was so foolishly frightened that he could not move a step.

He waited. At last he whispered "Is any one there?"

There was no answer. He pushed his way then out of the shadow, his heart drumming against his shirt. There was no one there. Of course there was not.

In his room once more with his friend Strang and the Rembrandt Donkey to take him home he sat on his bed holding his hands between his knees.

He was positively afraid of going down to dinner. Afraid of what? Afraid of being drawn in. Drawn into what? That was precisely what he did not know, but something that ever since his first glimpse of Maradick at the Reform Club had been preparing. It was that he saw, as he sat there thinking of it, that he feared—this Something that was piling up outside him and with which he had nothing to do at all.

Why should he mind because he had heard a girl say that she was frightened and wanted to go home? And yet he did mind—minded terribly and with increasing violence from every moment that passed. The thought of that child without a friend and on the very edge of an experience that might indeed be fatal for her, the thought of it was more than he could endure.

He was clever at escaping things did they only give him a moment's pause, but in this case the longer he thought about it the harder it was to escape from. It was as though the girl had made her personal appeal to himself.

But what an old scamp her father must be, Harkness thought, to give her up like this to a man for whom she has no love, who doesn't love her. Why did she do it? And what kind of a man is the father-in-law of whom she is so afraid and who dominates his son so absolutely? In any case I must go down to dinner. I must just take what comes. . .

Yes, but his prudence whispered, don't meddle in this affair actively. It isn't the kind of thing in which you are likely to distinguish yourself.

"No, by Jove, it isn't."

"Well, then, be careful."

"I mean to be." Then suddenly the girl's voice came sharp and clear. "Damn it, I'll do anything I can," he cried aloud, jumped from the bed and went downstairs.