And Alice let her face rest in Lady Gale’s dress and she promised. There was, as it happened, more in her promise than mere acquiescence. She had her own curiosity as to the way it was all going to turn out, and perhaps, deep in her heart, a hope that this girl down in the town would be nothing after all, and that Tony would return, when the two or three weeks were over, to his senses. But the real temptation that attacked her was terribly severe. It would be fatally easy to talk to Sir Richard, and, without saying anything either definite or circumstantial, to put him unmistakably on the track. The immediate issue would, of course, be instant marching orders for everybody, and that would be the last that Tony would see of his rustic. Her thoughts lingered around the girl. What was she like, she wondered? Coarse, with a face of beetroot red and flaxen hair; no, Tony had taste, he would know what to choose. She was probably pretty. Wild and uncouth, perhaps; that would be likely to catch him. And now she, Alice Du Cane, must stand quietly by and play the part of platonic friend. What fun life must be for the gods who had time to watch.
Meanwhile Tony had found Maradick in a deserted corner of the garden and had poured the afternoon’s history into his ears. It was a complete manual on the way to make love, and it came out in a stream of uninterrupted eloquence, with much repetition and a continual impulse to hark back to the central incident of the story.
“And then, at last, I told her!” A small bird in a nest above their heads woke for a moment and felt a little thrill of sympathy. “By heaven, Maradick, old man, I had never lived until then. She and I were swept into Paradise together, and for a moment earth had gone, rolled away, vanished; I can’t talk about it, I can’t really. But there we were on the sand with the sea and the sky! Oh, my word! I can’t make you feel it, only now I am hers always and she is mine. I am her slave, her knight. One always used to think, you know, that all the stuff men and women put about it in books was rot and dreadfully dull at that, but now it all seems different. Poetry, music, all the things that one loved, are different now. They are new, wonderful, divine! and there we were in the boat, you know, just drifting anywhere.”
Maradick played audience to this enthusiasm with a somewhat melancholy patience. He had felt like that once about Mrs. Maradick. How absurd! He saw her as he had seen her last with the bed-clothes gathered about her in a scornful heap and her eyes half closed but flashing fire. She had refused to speak to him! And he had kissed her once and felt like Tony.
“No, but a fellow can’t talk about it. Only, one thing, Maradick, that struck me as awfully funny, the way that she accepted everything. When I told her about my people, of course I expected her to be awfully disappointed. But she seemed to understand at once and accepted it as the natural thing. So that if it comes to running away she is quite prepared.”
“If it comes to running away!” The words at once brought the whole situation to a point, and Maradick’s responsibility hit him in the face like a sudden blow from the dark. For a moment fear caught him by the throat; he wanted, wildly, to fling off the whole thing, to catch the next train back to Epsom, to get away from this strange place that was dragging him, as it were, with a ghostly finger, into a whirlpool, a quagmire; anything was treacherous and dangerous and destructive. And then he knew, in the next instant, that though he might go back to Epsom and his office and all the drudgery of it, he would never be the same man again, he could never be the same man again. He knew now that the only thing in the world worth having was love—this town had shown him that—and that, for it, all the other things must go. This boy had found it and he must help him to keep it. He, Maradick, had found it; there were friends of his here—Tony, Mrs. Lester—and he couldn’t go back to the loneliness of his old life with the memory of these weeks.
“Look here,” he gripped Tony’s arm, “I don’t suppose I ought to have anything to do with it. Any man in his senses would tell your people, and there’d be an end of the whole thing; but I gave you my word before and I’ll go on with it. Besides, I’ve seen the girl. I’d fall in love with her myself, Tony, if I were your age, and I don’t want you to miss it all and make a damned muddle of your life just because you weren’t brave enough or because there wasn’t anyone to help you.”
“By Jove, Maradick, you’re a brick. I can’t tell you how I feel about it, about her and you and everything, a chap hasn’t got words; only, of course, it’s going forward. You see, you couldn’t tell my people after all that you’ve done—you wouldn’t, you know; and as I’d go on whether you left me or no you may just as well help me. And then I’m awfully fond of you; I like you better than I’ve ever liked any man, you’re such an understanding fellow.”
Tony took breath a moment. Then he went on—
“The mater’s really the only thing that matters, and if I wasn’t so jolly sure that she’d like Janet awfully, and really would want me to carry the thing through, I wouldn’t do it at all. But loving Janet as I do has made me know how much the mater is to me. You know, Maradick, it’s jolly odd, but there are little things about one’s mater that stick in one’s mind far more than anything else. Little things . . . but she’s always been just everything, and there are lots of blackguards, I know, feel just the same . . . and so it sort of hurts going on playing this game and not telling her about it. It’s the first thing I’ve not told her . . . but it will be all right when it’s over.”