“Oh!” cried Rupert, alarmed at the idea of going so pat upon their coming. “But—yes, I suppose you must. Only I—” he took courage, if it wasn’t desperation, in both hands and added, “Will you lunch with me to-morrow at the Carlton?”
She pretended to consult a full engagement-book. “I might just manage it,” she grudged defensively. Though he shrank her and she realized being shrunk by him, he was not to think that lunch with Mary Arden was less than a high privilege.
He took that view himself. “I shall be greatly honored,” he said sincerely: then Derek hustled him away, but not to the night club. Rupert resisted that anti-climax, he who had held Mary’s hand in his, “But I’m so grateful to you, Derek,” he emphasized.
“Are you? Then don’t be ungrateful if I tell you that no one’s quite sane on leave,” and sane or not, Rupert went to bed in the elated mood of a man who knows he has created something. “Like a hen clucking over an egg,” was Derek’s private-comment on his friend.
CHAPTER VII—MARY AND RUPERT
RUPERT lay in bed morosely contemplating the first fact about Leave—its brutal elasticity. If he did not know, on the one hand, what he had done to deserve the acquaintanceship of Mary Arden, he did not know, on the other, that he deserved that dark intrusion on brief London days, the Staithley visit. Fortune first smiled, then apishly grimaced, but he threw off peevishness with the bed-clothes and the tang of cold water. Soberly, if intrusion was in question, then it was Mary who intruded and if he hadn’t learned, by now, to take things as they came, he had wasted his time in France.
He must go to Staithley, he must attend the conclave of the Hepplestalls, but he need not then and there make his protest articulate. Would it, indeed, be decent, coming as he would straight from his first reverent visit to his father’s grave, to fling defiance at his uncles? If they cared to read consent into an attitude studiously noncommittal, why, they must; but he wouldn’t in so many words announce his irrevocable decision never to be bondsman to Hepplestall’s; he wouldn’t by any sign of his invite a tedium of disputation which might keep him, heaven knew how long, from London and his Mary.
His Mary! That was thought which outran discretion, truth and even hope. The most he sanguinely expected of her was that she would consent, for the period of his leave, to “play” with him and, of course, there was a matter, trivial but annoying, to be set right first. That introduction under his nickname bothered him: his silence suggested that he was ashamed to acknowledge himself at the moment of being presented to an actress, and the suggestion was insulting to her. So far, and so far as the invitation to lunch went, she had accepted him as her companion “on his face,” and it might have been romantic enterprise to see if she would continue to consort with a Fairy, a man cursed with a name as grotesque as Cyrano’s nose, but he took Mary too seriously to put their playtime in jeopardy by keeping up a masquerade. The last thing he would do was to traffic on his title, but the first was to let her know that he wasn’t a Fairy! By telling a waiter to address him as Sir Rupert? He didn’t like that way. The way of an intriguer. No, he must face his dilemma, hoping to find means to bring out the truth without (God forbid!) advertising it, and in the first moments of their meeting, too.