“No; but the horses and the men are more used to take care of themselves; they are to meet me at the Rectory. I am going there about this ridiculous bazaar. You can walk with me, if you like,” she said.
He seized a cap from the stand and lounged out after her into the rain. “I say—don’t you know?” he said, but paused there and added no more.
“Get it out,” said Lady Jane.
After a while, as he walked along by her side, his hands deep in his pockets, the rain soaking pleasantly into his thick tweed coat, he resumed: “Unexpected serious sort of jaw that, before little beggar like Algy—laughs at everything.”
“There was no chance of speaking to you alone,” said Lady Jane almost apologetically.
“Suppose not. Don’t say see my way to it. Don’t deny, though—reason in it.”
“And inclination, eh? not much of one without the other, if I am any judge.”
“First-rate judge, by Jove!” Sir Charles said.
And he added no more. But when he took leave of Lady Jane at the Rectory he took a long walk by himself in the rain, skirting the gardens of the Cliff and getting out upon the downs beyond, where the steady downfall penetrated into him, soaking the tweed in a kind of affectionate natural way as of a material prepared for the purpose. He strolled along with his hands in his pockets and the cap over his eyes as if it had been a summer day, liking it all the better for the wetness and the big masses of the clouds and the leaden monotone of the sea. It was all so dismal that it gave him a certain pleasure; he seemed all the more free to think of his own concerns, to consider the new panorama opened before him, which perhaps, however, was not so new as Lady Jane supposed. She had forced open the door and made him look in, giving all the details; but he had been quite conscious that it had been there before, within his reach, awaiting his inspection. There were a great many inducements, no doubt, to make that fantastic prospect real if he could. He did not want to go to India, though indeed it would have been very good for him in view of his sadly reduced finances and considerably affected credit in both senses of that word. He had not much credit at headquarters, that he knew; he was not what people called a good officer. No doubt he would have been brave enough had there been fighting to do, and he was not disliked by his men; his character of a “careless beggar” being quite as much for good as for evil among those partial observers; but his credit in higher regions was not great. Credit in the other sense of the word was a little failing too, tradesmen having a wonderful flair as to a man’s resources and the rising and falling of his account at his bankers. It would do him much good to go to India and devote himself to his profession; but then he did not want to go. Was it last of all or first of all that another motive came in, little Stella herself to wit, though she broke down so much in her attempts to imitate Lottie Seton’s ways, and was not amusing at all in that point of view? Stella had perhaps behaved better on that impromptu yachting trip than she was herself aware. Certainly she was far more guilty in the beginning of it than she herself allowed. But when the night was dark and the storm high, she had—what had she done? Behaved very well and made the men admire her pluck, or behaved very badly and frightened them—I cannot tell; anyhow, she had been very natural, she had done and said only what it came into her head to say and to do, without any affectation or thought of effect; and the sight of the little girl, very silly and yet so entirely herself, scolding them, upbraiding them, though she was indeed the most to blame, yet bearing her punishment not so badly after all and not without sympathy for them, had somehow penetrated Charles Somers’ very hardened heart. She was a nice little girl—she was a very pretty little girl—she was a creature one would not tire of even if she was not amusing like Lottie Seton. If a man was to have anything more to do with her, it was to be hoped she never would be amusing like Lottie Seton. He paced along the downs he never knew how long, pondering these questions; but he was not a man very good at thinking. In the end he came to no more than a very much strengthened conviction that Stella Tredgold was a very pretty little girl.