Chapter Two.
A Man’s Judgment.
Strange, indeed, that Wareham should have been thus shot into the society of Anne Dalrymple! Never personally acquainted with her, he had heard more about her than of any other living woman, could have described her positively, and believed he knew her mind. Heart he denied her. Had he been in England during the past year or two they must have met, but he had first been ordered abroad after a narrow escape of breakdown from over-work; then, bitten by the charm of the south, let himself drift lazily from Italy to Greece, from Greece to Egypt, from Egypt to India, all lands of enchantment.
During the latter part of this stay, letters had been showered upon him from his chief friend, Hugh Forbes, letters crammed with enthusiasm, with hope, with despair, a thundering chord, with the beautiful Miss Dalrymple for its root. Wareham pished and poohed, and sometimes pitched away as much as half a letter—unread—with a word. But he was a man with an unsuspected strength of sympathy. Probably it belonged to his success as an author that, once interested, he could project himself into another mind, and feel its sensations. Especially where his affections were concerned was this the case, and it may have been fortunate for him that his affections were not easily moved, perhaps because he feared what he counted a weakness, and was reluctant to let himself go. Once he had loved a woman, but this happened before he was famous, and she married a richer man; since that time his heart had apparently remained untouched, although he never avoided women’s society.
The dark time of disappointment drew him nearer to his friend. Hugh was three years his junior, but they had been at school together, and the habit of befriending the younger boy had stuck to Dick. When this happens, the strength of the tie is scarcely calculable, at least on the side of the elder. Hugh knew and acted upon it almost unconsciously. He would as soon have expected the Funds to collapse, as Dick to fail him in case of need.
After a time his letters announced the unexpected to Wareham. The affair was serious, and Miss Dalrymple had accepted him. Rapture filled sheets of paper. Then letters ceased, and Wareham, who was in India, smiled, recognising the inevitable; and waited without misgiving, until a cooler time should bring back the outer manifestations of a friendship which he could not doubt. They came in the form of a cry of misery. Within six weeks of the wedding Miss Dalrymple had broken off the engagement.
He read the letter in amazement, and rushed back to England, snapping the small ties with which he was lazily suffering himself to be entangled, and knowing that in the blackness of a lovers despair his was the only hand to bring the touch of comfort. Under his own misfortunes he had been dumb, but this reticence did not affect his sympathy with a more expansive nature. Hugh liked to enlarge upon his sorrows, unfailing interest lurked for him in the question how they might have been avoided, and the answer was never so convincing as to suffice.
Wareham gave a patient ear to the lengthy catalogue of Miss Dalrymple’s charms—until he could have repeated them without prompting—and offered one suggestion after another as to the causes which had induced her to break off her engagement. For there had been no quarrel, no explanation. Hugh had merely received a letter saying that she had discovered it to have been a mistake, and could not marry him; she accepted the whole blame, and asked him not to attempt to see her.