Lee flushed with pleasure and took his hand again.
“I wouldn’t make you unhappy for the world,” she said. “Only I thought I could show you that it was for the best. We are what we are. Brain and will and love can do a great deal, an immense amount, but it can’t make us quite over. We bolt our original self under and he gnaws at the lock and gets out sooner or later. The best way is to give him his head for a little and then he will go back and be quiet for a long time again. But——” she hesitated for so long a time that Cecil, who had been ramming his stick into the ground, turned and looked at her. “If I can’t make you agree with me,” she said, “I won’t go.”
“But you would stay unwillingly.”
“Oh, I do want to go!”
“Then go, by all means,” he said.
CHAPTER XX
DURING the following week Lee was not so absorbed in her friends that she would have been oblivious to a certain discomposure of the Abbey’s atmosphere, even had Mary Gifford not called her attention to it. Some of the guests had given place to others, but the Pixes, Lady Mary, and the Californians still remained. Of course they were all scattered during the day, but the evenings were spent in the great drawing-room and adjoining boudoirs and billiard-room, and it was obvious to the most indifferent that there was a discord in the usual harmony of the Abbey at this season. Lady Barnstaple’s temper had never been more uncertain, but no one minded that: Emmy was always sure to be amusing, whether deliberately or otherwise; that was her rôle. Nor was any one particularly disturbed by the increased acidity of Lord Barnstaple’s remarks; for when a man is clever he must be given his head, as Captain Monmouth had remarked shortly before he left; “and some pills are really cannon balls,” he had added darkly.
Mr. Pix was the disturbing element. He had managed to keep an effective shade over the light of his commonness in London, for he did not go out too much and was oftener in Paris. Moreover, Victoria, who was painfully irreproachable, had provided a sort of family reputation on which he travelled. But in the fierce and unremitting light of a house-party he revealed himself, and it was evident that he was aware of the fact; his assumption of ease and of the manner to which his fellow-guests were born grew more defiant daily, and there were times when his brow was dark and heavy. Everybody wondered why he did not leave. He handled his gun clumsily, and with manifest distaste, and it was plain that he had not so much as the seedling of the passion for sport. Nevertheless he stuck to it, and asserted that he longed for October that he might distinguish himself in the covers.
If the man had succeeded in giving himself an acceptable veneer, or if he had had the wit to make himself useful financially to the men with whom he aspired to associate, he would have gone down as others of his gilded ilk had gone down; but, as it was, every man in the Abbey longed to kick him, and they snubbed him as pointedly as in common courtesy to their host they could.
“I am actually uneasy,” said Lady Mary to Lee one evening as they stood apart for a moment in the drawing-room. The guests looked unconcerned enough. They were talking and laughing, some pretending to fight for their favourite tables; while in the billiard-room across the hall a half-dozen of the younger married women were romping about the table, shrieking their laughter. But Victoria Pix, looking less like a marble than usual, stood alone in a doorway intently regarding her brother, who was also conspicuously alone. And although Emmy was flitting about as usual, there was an angry light in her eyes and an ugly compression of her lips.