"Because he thinks there's money in me."
This was unanswerable.
CHAPTER XXV
THE WAY OUT
"Can it be right to give what I can give?"
—SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.
The mild spring weather made strolling in the garden pleasant, even in the keen air of Fransdale. Carol Mayne strolled accordingly, in company with Mr. Hall of Ilberston, and forgot manifold preoccupations in the pleasure of his company.
The last fortnight had been a curious and trying period in his life. He had become a mere bystander, where he had previously been a confidant. He was in the position of the trainer who has coached his man and sent him into the ring, and now has no more that he can do but to watch the conflict. Bert had stepped down into the arena, and had ever since ignored Carol to the point of rudeness. He had refused interviews, shirked even looks; had borne in total silence the daily rebuffs inflicted by Melicent—the continual pin-pricks of indifference under which he smarted.
Carol would have liked to hold the sponge between these preliminary rounds, but this was denied him. Perhaps, when some knock-out blow was dealt, his champion would have need of him. Just now, he was nowhere in the scheme of things.
But so deeply had he grown attached to this man that there was an unexpected degree of suffering entailed by the sight of his pain. Day by day his eye detected more and more of the old Bert surging up baffled, dogged, passionate, under the fine bearing of Captain Brooke. He remembered so well how things had gone in the old days—how long the big man would endure, and then suddenly, the oath that showed him goaded past bearing, the brief rage, the wild repentance. Twice he had seen Melicent—as he believed, unconsciously—bring things to this point, and Bert only save himself by immediate departure. But not a word of complaint, or of any kind of feeling, was to be got out of him afterwards. The thing seemed too deep, too momentous for comment to be possible. A kind of terror grew in Mayne as the days went by. What would happen if Bert were ultimately foiled? He could not foresee it, even dimly. He looked at the slip of a girl who swayed the man's wild blood, and tried to choke back his secret fear that tragedy might be the outcome of it all.
For Bert had encountered a rival on the very threshold of his enterprise; and the rival was the man whose life he had saved, at risk of his own, because he knew that through him he could get the introduction to Millie which he craved.