Chapter XV.
LOVE AND FEAR.
Well might Harry Belfield be subject to fits of temper and impatience! Well might he show signs of wear and tear not to be accounted for by the labours of a mild political campaign, carried on under circumstances of great amenity! He had fallen into a state of feeling which forbade peace within, and made security from without impossible. He was terribly at war in his soul. If he could have put the case so simply as that, being pledged to one girl, he had fallen in love with another, he would have had a plain solution open to him: he could break the engagement, facing the pain that he gave and the discredit that he suffered. His feelings admitted of no such straightforward remedy. The beliefs and the aspirations with which he had wooed Vivien were not dead; they were struggling for life against their old and mighty enemy. For him Vivien still meant happiness, and more than happiness—a haven for anything that was good in him, a refuge from all that was bad. With all his instincts of pure affection, of loyalty and chivalry, still he loved her and clung to her. She it was still who had power to comfort and soothe him, to send him forth able to do his work again. She was the best thing in his life; she seemed to him well-nigh his only chance against himself. Was he to throw the last chance away?
Then why not be true? Why deceive when he loved? Every day, nay, every hour, that question had to be asked in scorn and answered in bitterness. His happiness lay with one; the present desire of his eyes was for another. His mind towards Isobel was strange: often he hardly liked her; sometimes his hatred for what she was doing to his life made him almost hate her; always his passion for her was strong and compelling. Since the stolen kiss had set it aflame, it had spread and spread through him, fed by their secret interviews, till it seemed now to consume all his being in one fierce blaze. How could affectionate and loyal instincts stand against it? Yet he hated it. All the good of his nature his kindliness, his amiability, his chivalry—hated it. He was become as it were two men; and the one reviled the other. But when he reviled the passion in him as the murderer of all his happiness, it answered with a fell insinuation. Why these heroics and this despair? Why talk of happiness being murdered? There was another way. "Don't murder happiness for me," passion urged slyly. "I am violent, but I am a passing thing. You know how often I have come to you, and raged, and passed by. There's another way." That whisper was ever in his ears, and would not be silenced. That it might gain its end, his passion subtly minimized itself; it sought to enter into an unnatural alliance with his better part; it prayed in aid his purer love, his tottering loyalty, his old-time chivalry. A permanent reconciliation with these it could not, and dared not, ask; but a modus vivendi till it, transitory thing as it was, should pass away? So the tempter tempted with all his cunning.
Avoiding plain words for what that way was, he was seduced into asking whether it were open. He could not answer. Through all the stolen interviews, through other stolen kisses, he had never come to the knowledge of Isobel's heart and mind. He could read no more than she chose to let him read. She allowed his flirtation and his kisses, but almost scornfully. When he declared his state to be intolerable, she told him it was easy to end it—easy to end either the engagement or the flirtation at his option. She had not owned to love. A certain sour amusement seemed to lie for her in the affair. "We're a pair of fools," her eyes seemed to say when he embraced her, "but it doesn't much matter; nothing can come of it, and it'll soon be all over." When he saw that look, his old desire for conquest came over him; he was impelled at any cost to break down this indifference, to make his sway complete. Of her relations towards Wellgood she had flatly refused to say another word. "The less we talk about that just now the better." In some such phrase she always forbade the topic. There again he was left in an uncertainty which stung his pride and bred a fierce jealousy. By what she gave and what she withheld, by her silence no less than by her words, she inflamed his passion. She yielded enough to fill him with desire and hope of a full triumph; but even though she yielded, though her voice might falter and her eyes drop, she did not own love's mastery yet.
Thus torn and rent within, from without he seemed ringed round with enemies. Eyes that must needs be watchful were all about him. There was Andy Hayes with his chance knowledge of the first false step; Wellgood, who must have a jealous vigilance for the woman whom he had at least thought of making his wife; his own father, with his shrewd estimate of his son and acquaintance with past histories; Vivien herself, to whom he must still play devoted lover, with whom most spare hours must still be spent. To add to all these, now there came this girl from London! She had knowledge of past histories too; she had the sharpest of eyes; he feared even the directness of her tongue. Andy had seen, but not spoken; he did not trust Doris, if she saw, not to speak. He was terribly afraid of her. Small wonder that the suggestion of her stay at the Lion had called forth no enthusiasm from him! She took rank as an enemy the more. And Billy Foot was to be at Halton! She and Billy would lay their heads together and talk. Out of talk would come suspicion, out of suspicion more watchfulness. It was no business of theirs, but they would watch.
Political campaigning amidst all this! Well, in part it was a relief. The speeches and their preparation perforce occupied his mind for the time; on his platforms he forgot. Yet to go away—to leave Nutley for so many hours—seemed to his overwrought fancy a sore danger. What might happen while he was away? To what state of things might he any evening come back? Vivien might have revealed suspicions to Wellgood, or Wellgood might have challenged Isobel and compelled an answer. Once when Andy did not come to the meeting, he made sure that he had stayed behind on purpose to reveal his knowledge to Vivien or her father, and the evening was a long torture which no speeches could deaden, no applause allay.
In this fever of conflict and of fear his days passed. At this cost he bought the joy of the stolen interviews—that joy so mixed with doubt, so tainted by pain, so assailed by remorse. Yet for him so tense, so keen, so surcharged with the great primitive struggle. Ten minutes stolen once a day—it seldom came to more than that. Now and then, when he had no political excursion, a second ten, late at night, after his ostensible departure from Nutley. When he had "gone home," when Vivien had been sent to bed, and Wellgood had repaired to his pipe in the study, Isobel would chance to wander down the drive, looking into the waters of the lake, and he, lingering by the gate, see her and come back. Whether she would saunter out or not he never knew. Waiting to see whether she would seemed waiting for the fate of a lifetime.
One night—a week after the Fyfold Green meeting, a day after the Nun had taken possession of her quarters at the Lion—Harry had dined at Nutley and—gone home.
Isobel stole stealthily out; she had a quarter of an hour before doors would be locked. She strolled down the drive, a long dark cloak hiding the white dress which would have shown too conspicuously. As she went she dropped a letter; coming back she would pick it up. If any one asked why she had come out, the answer was—to find that letter, accidentally dropped. There had never been need of the excuse yet; it was still available.