You know the heavy, choking pain that lies leaden in your throat when one you love has gone out into the emptiness—the desperate unbelief in your torture—the mad hope that insists that this thing is too horrible to bear. My suffering came home to me like that. I could only think of Gwen as of one dead and gone from me, but with the added agony of knowing that to me she might have been life and love itself. I felt that I could beat the air, wrestling with my fate for my desire. I gasped, unmanned with wretchedness.
Then Gerry rose and put his hand upon my shoulder. Here again his selfishness was seven years younger than mine. He could lose his sorrow in sympathy.
“God be good to you, dear old chap,” he said; “it’s desperate, desperate luck, but after all is it too late? You’ve the place, the title, and all that—and after all, you know, the old boy might have come home and married any day—why can’t you follow them? Surely you might drop in with them somewhere.”
“Too late? Of course it’s too late,” said I bitterly. “Is a girl to wait for ever? Besides, they can’t hear of it for weeks—very likely not at all. By then Denvarre will have settled matters, if he isn’t the most consummate idiot on earth.”
“That may be all very well about Denvarre,” quoth Gerry wisely, “though I don’t see that it is for certain, all the same. But what about Gwen? You don’t allow her much independence of thought. Why should he happen to meet her fancy? Do you think she doesn’t know you worship the ground she walks on?”
I stared at him, gnawing uneasily at my moustache, and with the sense that he spoke the truth. Gwen knew it—must know it, but she must have seen, as did I, the hopelessness of the business—must have known that the farewell of that morning was to be the end. And yet—and yet that look she gave me. Was it merely questioning, or did it tell me something? I fell into that moody, unhealthy mind when one forbids oneself to hope for very hope of being mistaken—assuring myself that I knew there could be nothing but despair for me in the future, trusting all the same that wanton fate would prove me wrong. Which is a phase of unreason, I take it, more wearing than an utter yielding to desperation.
“Now, old chap,” went on Gerry soberly, “if you begin to muse and wonder you’ll never sleep to-night. I believe this thing comes in the light of luck for both of us. I feel twice the man I did half-an-hour ago, and I’m going to whine no more. However matters go you’re very much better off than you were this morning, and, as I said before, what’s to prove that either Gwen or Vi may not come back to us again? Heaps of things may happen in a year. Why,” he went on smiling, “with the influence of the Heatherslies at my back I mean to get an attachéship and marry Vi myself. At any rate I believe now that the game’s not over. I’ll be your best man yet, unless we’re both married together, and I won’t say that’s not possible.”
It was good to hear him say it, but all the time I was telling myself frantically that it was rot—that I mustn’t listen to him, and I backed my inward despondency with the spoken word.
“But even now,” I demurred, “what am I but a pauper peer? Fifty thousand acres of bog are mine, and a few English farms. What’s that to Denvarre’s forty thousand pounds a year and Gleivdon? I’d take an offer of five thousand pounds a year for all I possess.”
He rose and slapped me on the back cheerily, smiling as he reached for his hat.