In the library Hine turned to Garratt Skinner with one of his rare flashes of shrewdness.
"She didn't want to meet us," he said, jealously. "Do you think she cares for him?"
"I think," replied Garratt Skinner with a smile, "that Captain Chayne will not trouble us with his company again."
CHAPTER XIV
AN OLD PASSION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET
Garratt Skinner, however, was wrong. He was not aware of the great revolution which had taken place in Chayne; and he misjudged his tenacity. Chayne, like many another man, had mapped out his life only to find that events would happen in a succession different to that which he had ordained. He had arranged to devote his youth and the earlier part of his manhood entirely to his career, if the career were not brought to a premature end in the Alps. That possibility he had always foreseen. He took his risks with full knowledge, setting the gain against them, and counting them worth while. If then he lived, he proposed at some indefinite time, in the late thirties, to fall in love and marry. He had no parents living; there was the empty house upon the Sussex Downs; and the small estate which for generations had descended from father to son. Marriage was thus a recognized event. Only it was thrust away into an indefinite future. But there had come an evening which he had not foreseen, when, sorely grieved by the loss of his great friend, he had fallen in with a girl who gave with open hands the sympathy he needed, and claimed, by her very reticence and humility, his sympathy in return. A day had followed upon that evening; and thenceforth the image of Sylvia standing upon the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d'Argentière, with a few strips of white cloud sailing in a blue sky overhead, the massive pile of Mont Blanc in front, freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained fixed and riveted in his thoughts. He began in imagination to refer matters of moment to her judgment; he began to save up little events of interest that he might remember to tell them to her. He understood that he had a companion, even when he was alone, a condition which he had not anticipated even for his late thirties. And he came to the conclusion that he had not that complete ordering of his life on which he had counted. He was not, however, disappointed. He seized upon the good thing which had come to him with a great deal of wonder and a very thankful heart; and he was not disposed to let it lightly go.
Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the unattractive figure of "red-hot" Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner expected. Chayne, instead of turning his back upon so distasteful a company, frequented it in the resolve to take Sylvia out of its grasp. It did not need a lover to see that she slept little of nights and passed distressful days. She had fled from her mother's friends at Chamonix, only to find herself helpless amongst a worse gang in her father's house. Very well. She must be released. He had proposed to take her away then and there. She had refused. Well, he had been blunt. He would go about the business in the future in a more delicate way. And so he came again and again to the little house under the hill where the stream babbled through the garden, and every day the apples grew redder upon the boughs.
But it was disheartening work. His position indeed became difficult, and it needed all his tenacity to enable him to endure it. The difficulty became very evident one afternoon early in August, and the afternoon was, moveover, remarkable in that Garratt Skinner was betrayed into a revelation of himself which was to bear consequences of gravity in a future which he could not foresee. Chayne rode over upon that afternoon, and found Garratt Skinner alone and, according to his habit, stretched at full-length in his hammock with a cigar between his lips. He received Captain Chayne with the utmost geniality. He had long since laid aside his ineffectual vulgarity of manner.
"You must put up with me, Captain Chayne," he said. "My daughter is out. However, she—I ought more properly to say, they—will be back no doubt before long."
"They being—"