He did call on the following Friday, after having passed the intervening two days in wandering about London; in going to a race meeting one day and a cricket match at the Oval the next; in trying a dinner at one foreign restaurant on the Wednesday, and another at a second foreign restaurant on Thursday; but all the time he felt restless and unsettled, and wished that four o'clock on Friday was at hand.
'This won't do,' he said to himself, before the cricket match on Thursday was half over, and while he sat baking in the sun that streamed down on to the Oval--which disturbed him not at all, and had no power to make him any browner--'this won't do. I must go to sea at once. By the time I have seen that girl again I shall be head over ears in love with her. And the interest on £4000 in India Stock--by Jove! it isn't quite £4000 since I've been loafing about on shore!--and a chief officer's pay won't keep a wife. Not such a wife as she would be, anyway.'
He did not know it--or, perhaps, he did know it and would not acknowledge it to himself--but he was very nearly head over ears in love with Bella Waldron already. And he had only seen her once--been by her side at a theatre for three hours--with three intervals of ten minutes in which to talk to her! Yet the girl's beauty, her gentle innocence, and above all, that trusting confidence with which she seemed to look out upon all that was passing before her, and to regard the world as what it appeared to be and to take it at its own valuation, had captured him. Still, he should have known--he must have known--that when a man who has never thought much of the women he has met heretofore, and has generally forgotten what their features were like by the next day, takes to lying awake for hours dreaming at last of one woman with whom he has by chance come into contact, he is as nearly in love with her as it is possible for him to be.
So, at least, those report who have been in love, and so it has been told to the writer of this narrative!
He made his way to Montmorency Road, West Kensington, exactly at four o'clock, and while he sat in the pretty drawing-room talking to Mrs. Waldron, who was alone at present--the appearance of Bella being promised by her mother in a few moments--he found himself wondering what the girl did with her life here. He had seen a bicycle in the passage as he was shown upstairs, so he supposed she rode that; while there were some photographs of rather good-looking men standing about on the semi-grand and on the plush-covered mantelshelf--which made him feel horribly annoyed, until Mrs. Waldron, seeing his glance fixed on them, informed him that they were mostly cousins who were out of the country, and that one or two of them happened to have succumbed to various climatic disorders abroad, for which catastrophes he did not seem to feel as sorry as he supposed he ought to do. Then Bella came in, looking radiantly beautiful in a summer dress (a description of which masculine ignorance renders impossible), and Stephen Charke was happy for ten minutes. For they all talked of the impending fêtes at Portsmouth in honour of the foreign fleet, and Charke found himself in an Elysium when Bella promised him--without the slightest self-consciousness or false shame--that she would undoubtedly have some dances reserved for him.
Yet, soon, other callers came in, and Stephen Charke found himself deprived of the pleasure of further conversation with Bella. An elderly dowager claimed her attention, and a middle-aged lady--of, as he considered, menacing aspect--regaled him with the evil doings of her domestic servants, a subject of about as much interest to this wanderer of the seas as that of embroidery or tatting would have been. An Irish Doctor of Divinity also disturbed his meditations on Bella's beauty by telling funny stories, the point of which the divine had forgotten until he refreshed his memory by reference to a little note-book in which he had them all written down, while a young militia subaltern who had failed for the Army--and seemed rather proud of it!--irritated him beyond endurance. Yet, even through this fatuous individual, there came something that was welcome to him, since he saw Bella regarding the youth with a look of scarcely veiled contempt, and he longed to tell the idiot that the only failure for which women have no pity in this world is that of the intellect.
'Goodbye,' he said to Bella, who accompanied him to the head of the stairs, after he had made his adieux to her mother. 'Goodbye. Next week--Portsmouth--and--my dances.'
'I shall not forget,' she said.
After which he wandered off by devious and intricate ways (which reminded him of some of the narrow passages he knew of between the islands in the China seas) and so arrived at the District Railway.
And all the time he was telling himself that he was a fool--an absolute fool. 'I have fallen in love with a girl I have only seen twice,' he meditated, as the train ran through the sulphurous regions underground, and he endeavoured to protect his lungs by smoking cigarette after cigarette; 'a girl who is not, and never can be, anything to me. She will make a good match some day; she must make a good match--girls of her position and looks always do; and, a year or two hence, I shall luff into some unearthly harbour abroad, and run against Pooley, who will tell me that she has done so.'