He watched her as she glided from the room, so slim and beautiful and disdainful. Perhaps a shadow of regret for her passed across his mind, a thought of what a woman, what a wife, even, she might have been under other circumstances; but it did not go far into him. Things were as they were; he had long since given up bothering about them, trying only to think and feel as little as possible. He took up his book again and read far into the night.
CHAPTER XI
HESITANCIES AND TEARS
Thomas Mackintosh Drummond Erskine, by courtesy known as Viscount Clairloch, was not a remarkably complicated person. His life was governed by a few broad and well-tried principles which he found, as many had found before him, covered practically all the contingencies he was called upon to deal with. One wanted things, and if possible, one got them. That was the first and great commandment of nature, and the second was akin to it; one did nothing contrary to a thing generally known as decency. This was a little more complicated, for though decency was a natural thing—one always wanted to be decent, other things being equal—it had a rather difficult technique which had to be mastered by a long slow process. If any one had asked Tommy how this technique was best obtained he would undoubtedly have answered, by a course of six years at either Eton, Harrow or Winchester, followed by three years at one of half a dozen colleges he could name at Oxford or Cambridge.
Occasionally, of course—though not often—the paths of desire and decency diverged, and this divergence was sometimes provocative of unpleasantness. Treated sensibly, however, the problem could always be brought to an easy and simple solution. Tommy found that in such a case it was always possible to do one of two things; persuade oneself either that the desire was compatible with decency or that it did not exist at all. Either of those simple feats of dialectic accomplished, everything worked out quite beautifully. It is a splendid thing to have been educated at Harrow and Christchurch.
Ever since he arrived in America it had been evident to Tommy that he wanted Beatrice. He did not want her with quite the absorbing intensity that would make him one of the great lovers of history—Harrow and Christchurch decreed that one should go fairly easy on wanting a married woman—but still he wanted her, for him, very much indeed. Up to the night of the boat-race everything had gone swimmingly. Then, indeed, he had received a setback; a setback which came very near making him abandon further pursuit and proceed forthwith to those portions of America which lie to the west of Upper Montclair. If Aunt Cecilia had not casually invited him to accompany the yacht on its trip round Cape Cod he might have started the very next morning. But he went to Bar Harbor, and before he left there it had become plain to him that he could probably have what he had so long desired.
Everything had favored him. Aunt Cecilia had made it pleasant for him for a while, and when the time came when Aunt Cecilia might be expected to become tired of making it pleasant for him others came forward who were more than willing to do as much. Tommy was a desirable as well as an agreeable guest; he looked well in the papers. With the result that he was still playing about Bar Harbor at the end of July, at which time Beatrice, looking quite lovely and wan and heat-fagged, came, unattended by her husband, to be the chief ornament of Aunt Cecilia's spacious halls.
And how Beatrice had changed since he last saw her! She was as little the cold-eyed, contemptuous Artemis of that night in New London as she was the fresh-cheeked débutante of his early knowledge; and she was infinitely more attractive, he thought, than either of them. She had a new way of looking up at him when he came to greet her; she was willing to pass long hours in his sole company; she depended on him for amusement, she relied on him in various little ways; and more important, she soon succeeded in making him forget his fear of her. For the first time in his knowledge of her he had the feeling of being fully as strong as she, fully as self-controlled, as firm-willed. This was in reality but another symptom of her power over him, but he never recognized it as such.
Appetite, as we know, increases with eating, and every sign of favor that came his way fanned the almost extinguished flame of Tommy's desire into renewed warmth and vigor. Before many weeks it had grown into something warmer and more vigorous than anything he had ever experienced, till at last his gentle bosom became the battlefield of the dreaded Armageddon between desire and decency. It wasn't really dreaded, in his case, because he was not the sort of person who is capable of living very far ahead of the present moment, and perhaps, in view of the strength of both the contending forces, the term Armageddon may be an exaggeration; but it was the most serious internal conflict that the good-natured viscount (by courtesy) ever knew.