“Oh, I’m all jolly,” I said, with forced carelessness. “Think I got a touch of the sun yesterday. All right again now.”
The while I was helping to extract the other occupants of the Cape cart—first Iris, then Beryl. Her quick, solicitous glance as we clasped hands was not lost on me, nor was the tact wherewith she refrained from adding her comments upon my personal appearance. Then George got himself out, looking very sobered and subdued, and quite different to the impudent mischievous pup of so short a while back.
“Where’s the dad?” said Brian, looking up from his outspanning. “He’s not seedy, too, is he?”
“Not a bit. He’s down in the further land. Ah, here he comes. By Jove, Brian, you’ve had rather a load,” I went on, as I helped in the extraction of numerous bundles, and in the casting loose of the luggage lashed on behind. I must be doing something, I felt; talking too, otherwise the contrast between this return as I had pictured it hardly twenty-four hours ago and as it now was, would have been too forcibly brought home. Then, even though others were by, I would have managed to convey to Beryl what a delight her return had brought to, at any rate, myself; now, we had met in ordinary conventional fashion, and she was chatting with the stranger, while I chaffed Iris and tried to cheer up that poor little devil, George.
The stranger aforesaid, whose name was Pentridge, was a well-set-up, good-looking fellow of about my own age, a man to whom under other circumstances I should have taken. But now it was easy to see that Beryl occupied nearly, if not quite, as large a preponderance in his thoughts as she did in mine. He was a doctor by profession, and an old acquaintance of the Mattersons, though they had not met for some time. Now, meeting him by chance in Fort Lamport, Beryl had invited him out to the farm.
Here was a new element in the situation for which I had not bargained. The said situation I had thought out again and again during the twenty-four hours which had intervened since my first hearing the abominable news, and notably during an almost sleepless night. I would not say anything about it yet; would take time to think it over more fully. Meanwhile I had found some comfort in the thought that things would be to all outward appearance as they had been. Beryl and I would be together as before; and did I, by any chance, cherish a wild vague hope that anything might happen to cut the knot of the whole difficulty? I believe I did.
But now the advent of this stranger upset all this. In him I saw a rival, and a potent one, for he was probably in a position to declare himself at any moment, while I must perforce lie low. Not only this, but there was that in the personality of the fellow which rendered him doubly dangerous, for he was one of those men to whom all women would naturally turn, some indeed with headlong resistless attraction; whereas I, Kenrick Holt—plain, common-place, plodding—knew myself to be endowed with no such attributes, and had anybody hinted to the contrary, should have laughed in their face.
Upon the resolve to keep my own counsel for the present followed another one, and this was to throw off the dead weight which the change in my fortunes had at first bound upon me, outwardly at any rate. Wherefore as we all shook down again into the ordinary routine of life, I avoided any appearance of aloofness and strove to bear myself as if there had been no change at all. But it involved a tremendous effort of will, amounting at times almost to physical anguish. For instance, if we were taking a collective walk or ride, and I had to witness the incidental pairing off together of Beryl and Pentridge, the bitter reflection that up till now it would have been her and myself would require some crushing down, it may safely be assumed; or in half a hundred incidents of everyday life he had a way of showing her little attentions, and that in a way which to me, at any rate, was unmistakable, though there was this about Pentridge, he never trod upon his own heels, so to say, with over-eagerness.
Still, my manner towards her must have undergone an unconscious change, for more than once Beryl would give me a strange look which I could not quite fathom. Sometimes, too, she would take on almost a coldness towards me, as different from her former free, unaffected cordiality as it could possibly be. Ah! a light suddenly dawned upon me. I was in the way, was becoming a nuisance to her. And acting upon this idea, I threw myself into the work of the place with tenfold energy. That would keep me out pretty well all day, and every day—but then, there was always the evening.
To me there was a humorous element underlying even this situation, and it spelt Trask. Trask’s disgust on finding Pentridge already in the field was quite comical. He could no longer monopolise the conversation, and when he started in to be funny, Pentridge, without seeming to do so, would invariably cap his would-be wit, and effectually turn it against himself. In short, to use a homely metaphor, Trask’s nose was put clean out of joint.