“I hardly believe that he committed suicide. I think that he was wild with pain, and did not count the drops. He was probably half blind. On the other hand, he was capable of anything when in a rage.”
Mr. Simms scraped the floor with his boot-heels and beat a tattoo on his knee with his fingers. “Very well,” he said at last. “We take your word, of course. Now tell me as nearly as you can, every circumstance of that night, and give me a general idea of your relations with him and your reasons for leaving him. It is going to be one of the biggest fights this State has ever seen, and we want all the help you can give us.”
After he had gone Patience fell into a rage. Why had not Bourke come himself instead of sending his underling? If he hesitated to meet her after the abominable words he had used that second night at Peele Manor why had he undertaken her case at all? Her pride revolted at the thought of being defended by him, of owing her life to him. Once she was at the point of writing him a haughty note declining to accept his services; but Latimer Burr’s kindness deserved a more gracious acknowledgment. Again, she took up her pen to inform him that unless he apologised he must understand that she could have no relations with him; but her lively fear of making herself ridiculous came to the rescue, and she threw the pen aside. She resumed her novel, but it had lost its flavour. Bourke’s face was on every page. The interview in the elm walk wrote itself between the French lines; and the subsequent conversation in the library danced in letters of red. She hated Bourke the more bitterly because he had once been something more to her than any other man had been. She worked herself into such a bad humour that she almost snubbed Miss Merrien and a “Day” artist who came to interview and sketch her; and when Morgan Steele arrived, late in the afternoon, she was as perverse and unreasonable as if the widowed châtelaine of Peele Manor with the world at her feet. He understood her mood perfectly, although not the cause of it, and guyed her into good humour and her native sense of the ridiculous.
“Oh, I do like you,” she said. “You understand me so. Any other man would go off in a huff. And I won’t always be like this. I suppose I am nervous and upset and all the rest of it. Who wouldn’t be? And you know I am tremendously fond of you.”
“I know you are,” he said dryly. “As you will have ample time for reflection and meditation in the next few months, you will find out just how fond. But I am more glad than I can say to find you in this mood. It is as healthy as irritability in illness. I am even willing to be sacrificed.”
Patience put out her hand and patted his soft hair with a spasm of genuine affection. “You are the dearest boy in the world,” she said, “and I do love you. For all your uncanny wisdom and cold-blooded philosophy you are just a big lovable good-natured boy.”
“Just the kind of fellow a woman would like to have for a brother, in short.”
“No! No! I think it will be the most charming thing in the world to be married to you. You are such a compound. You will interest me forever. Most people are such bores after a little.”
“If you hadn’t started out in life with ideas upside-down, you would really love me in loving me no more than you do now. But ideals and the fixed idea have got to be worked out to the bitter end, as you are fond of remarking. In reality, happiness means a comfortable state of affairs between a man and a woman with plenty of brains, philosophy, and passion, who are wholly congenial in these three matters, and have chucked their illusions overboard. However, we won’t discuss the matter any further at present. How do you like being the sensation of the day?”
“Am I?”