There had been no love-making on Oliver's part—no, indeed!—but the very phrase has acquired a vulgar significance. The girl thought she knew every way of love, and she shrank from being "made love to." Captain Laxton's eager desire to anticipate her every trifling wish, his awkward and most unprovoked compliments, the haunting of her when she would so much rather have been alone—ah! no, Oliver could never behave like that, in so absurd, so undignified a manner, to any woman. If Captain Laxton was a typical lover, then Lucy Kemp felt sure that Boringdon was incapable of being, in that sense, in love, and she thought all the better of him for it.
Nay, more,—the belief that Oliver was in this so different from other, more commonplace, men, brought infinite comfort. Lucy, compelled to admit that he had at no time shown any wish to make love to her, brought herself to think it possible that Boringdon was in very truth incapable of that peculiar jealous passionate feeling of which the girl now knew herself to be as much possessed as was Captain Laxton himself—that strange state of feeling so constantly described in those novels which she and her mother read, and of which her soldier lover, when in her company, seemed the living embodiment.
During the past ten days, Lucy had only twice seen Oliver, and this in village life must mean deliberate avoidance. So feeling, pride, and instinctive modesty, had kept her away from the Cottage, and Mrs. Boringdon—this was surely strange—had made no effort to see her. Once, in a by-way of Chancton, Lucy had met Oliver face to face,—he had stopped her, inquired eagerly concerning Mrs. Kemp, and seemed inclined, more than she had done at the moment, to talk in the old way, to linger—then with an odd, almost rude abruptness, he had turned and left her, and tears, of which she had been bitterly, agonisingly ashamed, had rushed into poor Lucy's brown eyes.
Their other meeting—one which was infinitely pleasanter to look back upon—had been at the Grange. Boringdon had come with a note from his mother to Mrs. Kemp; Lucy had taken it from him at the door, and unasked he had followed the girl through the hall out into the old-fashioned garden. There, after a word said by her as to the surprising result of an important by-election,—since she had known him Lucy had become very much of a politician,—Oliver had suddenly taken from his pocket a letter which concerned him nearly, and acting as if on an irresistible impulse, he had begged her to read it.
The letter was from a man who had been one of his principal constituents and supporters during his brief period of Parliamentary glory, and contained private information concerning the probable resignation of the member who had been Boringdon's successful rival at the last election—it of course amounted to an invitation to stand again.
For a moment standing, out there in the garden, Time seemed to have been put back: Oliver and she were talking in the old way—indeed, he was just telling her exactly what he meant to write in answer to this all-important letter, when, to Lucy's discomfiture and deep chagrin, General Kemp had suddenly appeared in the garden porch of the Grange and had put a quick sharp end to the discussion. "Your mother wants you, Lucy—will you please go up to her at once?" and the girl had obeyed without saying good-bye, for she felt sure—or perhaps, had hoped to ensure—that Boringdon would wait till she came down again. But alas! when she ran down, a few minutes later, the young man was gone, and her father answered her involuntary look of deep disappointment with one that made her hang her head and blush! The child in Lucy asked itself pitifully how father could have been so unkind.
General Kemp had indeed been angry—nay, more than angry. The showing of a letter by a man to a woman is an action which to an onlooker has about it something peculiarly significant and intimate. Standing just within the threshold of his house, seeing the two figures standing on the path close to one another, and so absorbed in what they were saying that some moments elapsed before they looked up and became aware of his presence, the father realised, more than he had done before, Lucy's odd relation to the young man. "What the devil"—so General Kemp asked himself with rising anger—"what the devil did Boringdon mean by all that sort of thing?"
"Il faut qu'une porte soît ouverte ou fermée!" The wise French saying which provided de Musset with a title for one of his most poignant tragi-comedies, was probably unknown to General Kemp, but it exactly expressed his feeling. The upright soldier had no liking for half-open doors—for ambiguous sentimental relations.
"I can't think what the man was thinking of—taking a letter out of his pocket, and showing it to her for all the world as if she were his wife! I wish, Mary, you'd say a word to Lucy."