Denis Malster was sufficiently sensitive to be vaguely aware of the element of an organised attack in the behaviour of the young nobleman, upright and above-board as it had been; hence his hurrying of his inestimable treasure,—the one creature that could give him peace,—along the road to Headlinge that evening; hence too the tactics he had resolved to adopt. For he felt instinctively, not only that Lord Henry was moving against him, but also that Mrs. Delarayne was fast becoming an open enemy.
They entwined fingers discreetly as they walked along, and the moment they had plunged into the grove, he would raise her hand from time to time, as he spoke, and kiss it fervently. It was cool and firm, a beautiful symbol of her beautiful body, and he was racked with a wildness of longing by the side of which the language of Cupid sounds like the pipe of a bird in a hurricane.
It seemed to his resourceful mind that possibly the best way of securing this girl's attachment to him, would be by a vivid appeal to her senses. His prestige was at stake, and in this dilemma men have been known to go to even greater lengths than when driven by sensuality alone. He did not underestimate the vigour of her passions, and knew that in this direction there was hope of uncontested victory.
"How heavenly it is," he said, "to have you quite alone for once, with nothing but wild nature looking on! How I loathe that crowd when it keeps us apart even for a moment."
He halted for a second, and they kissed.
"Oh, Leo, my darling," he continued, as they again walked slowly towards Headlinge, "you don't know how I suffer to see you in your present environment. You who are so natural, so essentially a creature of the wilds, surrounded by things that are so artificial, so overheated, so stagey. I shudder every time I hear you call the Warrior 'Peachy.' It shows how grossly your true nature has been distorted to serve her artificial ends. The beautiful word 'mother' would give the lie to the deception she tries to practice daily upon all of us, with every means that her art can supply. Excuse my speaking like this of your mother; but I imagine you a wild creature of the woods, with flowing hair; your mother a natural parent, who resigns herself cheerfully and becomingly to age, whose face is coloured uniquely by the sun, despising as much as you yourself surely do those petty tricks of make-believe,—those cosmetics and hair-dyes, that don't even deceive the coarsest chauffeur on the road,—and realising the charm of her years as much as she admires the beauty of yours. It makes me boil to see you corrupted by this atmosphere!"
He was careful at the end of each little speech to stop and fondle her, and to press her cool firm fingers to his lips in an ecstasy of devotion.
"You were not made to rear a town-street full of dandies, of Lord Henrys and his like, but to be the proud dam of a stalwart race of yeomen. It is in just such a wild setting as this that you, the Diana of a truly British country-side, could shine to greatest perfection. You are a child of freedom, a bird whose gorgeous wings they are trying to clip."
They sat down on a bank. The brilliance of the moon illuminated the country beyond. The chimneys of Sir Joseph's house were visible far away to the right.
He had another passionate outburst, convincing because he was genuinely at his wit's end with longing. He smothered her with his embraces, rained kisses on a face that was seductively screened by roughly dishevelled hair, and which smiled back at him with a look of intoxication almost equal to his own. And then at last, concluding instinctively that the moment had come for complete forgetfulness, he even thought he might proceed to discount bills of intimacy before they had become due,—a practice not uncommon in England,—and he held her in a way that was at least novel to the eager flapper.