And Lumsden, quite possibly, was measuring the moral distance between the cad who shoots a pheasant on the ground and the sportsman who flushes it and gives it a fly for its life. Or for better sport—which is it?—and to take a surer aim.
VI
THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
Among the minor penalties with which fate, presumably solicitous for a true balance, hampers excellence in this world, not alone the acquired excellence, which, being achieved in its teeth, explicably earns its maleficence, but even the natural advantages which were its own unsolicited gift, one, we think, has escaped the attention it deserves. We refer to a certain isolation and lack of touch with their immediate entourage which those who are marked for the world's prizes never quite succeed in overcoming, however modestly they wear or anticipate their honors. They are interesting, and for a correct view a certain distance, respectful, (though not necessarily so to them), is judged advisable. Society opens its ranks to receive them, but never quite closes on them again. None who have studied the lives of the giants but will have noticed how rarely a friendship disinterestedly worthy of them came their way, and is not the fatality of beauty, encountering the spoiler where the friend was imagined, a proverb? Fenella had not lived her new life a month before she was aware of a subtle atmosphere which was not treachery and which could not, without begging the question, have been called disrespect, but which partook a little of both. One does not feel a thing less keenly for being unable to exactly define it. Instincts are given women to be acted on, not to be explored. Its manifestations as yet had been only vaguely disquieting. Among the men it was apparent rather as a half jocular reservation of judgment—a determination, in view of possible developments, not to be committed to any one view of her character now, and, above all, never to be in the position of having more knowing brothers administer a rebuke to worldly wisdom. And among the women it took the shape of a coldness in meeting her advances which contrasted puzzlingly with the outspoken admiration that invited them. Poor, warm-hearted, ignorant Fenella! experiencing for the first time the full benefits of the benefit of the doubt.
It might be inevitable, or it might not, that, as day followed day of a visit so rapidly losing its charm, the broad-shouldered figure of the sporting baronet should begin to stand out more and more sympathetically against this background of veiled disrespect and thwarting reserve. It is true that the openness of his first advances had been the thing nearest approaching insult that she could remember, but, such as it was, it was forgiven now and, womanlike, the fault, frankly owned, brought him nearer. More womanlike still, perhaps, she liked him the better because he had been a witness to the old lost love of the summer. He at least saw her in no half light. She did not care greatly if he believed the worst—took a perverse joy, indeed, in believing it was possible he did. She was on her way now to a life where such things were no handicap, to which, indeed, she half suspected they were sometimes the initiation. She was content the knowledge of her own integrity should remain—a secret satisfaction to herself—content to feel it as a dancer of the fervid south, beneath her languorous draperies, may feel the chill of the dagger that she carries thrust through her garter.
He was kind and helpful too, not with the troublesome insistence of a man anxious to make amends for a former mistake, but as though, the ground having been cleared once for all of false conceptions, misunderstanding was no longer likely between them. Mourning and seclusion, she discovered, were comparative terms among country neighbors, and amid the men with whom the house intermittently abounded he showed both a finer creature and a finer gentleman. Once, in the billiard-room, when Warrener the full-blooded hinted that her cheeks lacked roses, and made as if to pour out whiskey for her, Lumsden took the decanter from his hand without a word, and put it back on the wooden ledge that ran round the room. She had come on a message to him from Leslie.
"I'd send one of the maids, Flash, when it's as late as this," he said, simply, as soon as they were in the corridor.
He had adopted Jack's favorite nickname for her when they were alone once and for all, but it was noticeable he never used it in the hearing of a third person. The thing had no importance, but it is a type of the assumptions she was finding it so difficult to resist.
It was he who, after all, taught her to ride. Jack Barbour, to do him justice, was prepared to redeem an old promise so soon as, to use his own words, "the bone was gone out of the ground," but frost followed the snow and held for days after tobogganing had been voted flat, stale and unprofitable. It wasn't Bryan's way to wait. He had more tan and straw laid down over the path, bordered with evergreens, that led from the stable-yard to poor Lady Lulford's steam laundry, and along which the horses were exercised every day. Fenella's heart fluttered and there was no lack in her cheeks of the roses whose absence Warrener deplored as, dressed in a borrowed habit of Leslie's that pinched her unconfined waist sorely, and with her hair in a pigtail again, she put her foot in her master's looped hand. Maids and stable-boys were peeping round the outbuildings.
He flicked the gray mare with his whip, and for more than an hour, letting the rope he held run out to its full length, pulled the animal backward and forward in a kind of "eight" figure. He threw away his cigar, and his voice rang out crisp and decisive as on a barrack square.