"Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary?"
"Good mercy, my dear man!" she screamed; "don't pounce. I infer nothing, except that Miss Mildare happens to be a live girl, with eyes and the gift of charm, and that the young men are attracted to her as naturally as drones to a honey-pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she will dispose of her honey to the best advantage." Her beady bright eyes snapped suddenly at Saxham, and her small face broke up into laughter. "Ha, ha, ha! Why, I do believe ..." She screamed at him triumphantly. "You, too! You've succumbed. She carries your scalp at her pretty waist with the rest of 'em. How perfectly delightful!"
Possibly Saxham had always been a bear, as her little ladyship had stated, but the last five years had certainly scraped off whatever social veneer had adhered to his manners. The power of facial self-control, the common tact that would have carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet and stood before the woman whose six ounces less of brain-matter had been counterbalanced by so large an allowance of intuition, dumbly furious with her, and so unspeakably savage with himself for not being able to hide his anger and annoyance that, as he stood before her with his hulking shoulders hunched and his square, black head sullenly lowered, and his eyes blazing under their heavy brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's nimble wit and travelled experience the undeniable analogy between a chaffed and irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, goaded by the stab of the gaudy paper-flagged dart in his thick neck, and bewildered by the subsequent explosion of the cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally said, and had pigeon-holed the joke for Bingo when it became none.
"Do, please, forgive me!... What you must think of me!..." she began contritely.
Repentance gave place to resentment. Saxham, without even an abrupt inclination of the head, had swung about and left her. She saw the heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built figure crossing the drift a little way down, stepping from boulder to boulder with those curiously small, neat feet, twirling his old horn-handled hunting-crop as he went, with a decidedly vicious swish of the doubled thong. Now he was knee-deep in the reeds of the north shore; now he was climbing the bank. A black-and-white crow flew up heavily, and was lost among the intertwining branches of the oaks and the blue-gums, and a cloud of finches and linnets rose as the covert of tree-fern and cactus and tall grass, knitted with thorny-stemmed creeper, received him and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of the foliage that he turned up the stream, and then no more of him. Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate wretch! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the man of the perfidy of that underbred passée little person with the passion for French novels and sulphonal tabloids, who had thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his brother the Dragoon—how could she have charged him with being a victim to the charms of another young woman? If Mrs. David's desertion rankled still, as no doubt it did, there being no accounting for masculine taste, he would, of course, resent the accusation almost as an insult. Men were such Conservatives in love. And, besides, she had just been telling him about the child. She loathed herself for having perpetrated such a blunder. Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting her abruptly; but hadn't she deserved the snub? She deserved snubbing. She would go, for the health of her soul, and talk to dearest Biddy, who always made you feel even smaller than you had thought yourself before.
She stood up, shaking the sand-grams and grass-burrs from her dress and the folds of the white umbrella. It was nearing six o'clock. The heat was lessening, and the pale turquoise sky overhead was flecked and dappled with little puffs of rosy cloud, bulking in size and deepening in colour to the westward, where their upper edges were pure gold. And the river looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon which giant rose-leaves had been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of different sexes, and made Sister Tobias pause over her task of wiping crockery to shake her head and laugh.
Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist a few days later, the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carrying him off. And the girl who screamed coquettishly as the mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet fingers under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the Cornishman's memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full of pathetic feminine fripperies, and a wedding-ring that had been worn barely two months. But they did not know this, and they were happy. We should never love or laugh if we knew.
Two other people had passed along the path that ran by the margin of the sand and reed-patches, and were lost to sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards the Mother-Superior, who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the Chaplain, and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.
Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where their charges were concerned. And certainly, if young people never got away together without qu'il ne vous en déplaise! there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.
The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at Beau's marrying a girl without a dot, who was not only lovely enough to set Society screaming over her, but modest and a lady. Up to the present his tendency had been to exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness above moral immaculateness.