Part 17 (1/2)
He pressed her for details. But beyond a general a.s.surance, conveyed with an air of mystery that on the morrow he would find their coffers quite replete, she would tell him nothing. They went to lunch together, for there was always some small silver at the bottom of Cleo's purse, and she then gave him to understand she had business to transact here and there during the afternoon, and that he must amuse himself alone as best he could.
Vaguely supposing that this secret business had reference to the raising of funds, Morgan separated from her and went back to their rooms, where, at least, he felt he was hidden away from the world. A little later he had an idea. He would go and see Helen.
CHAPTER VII.
Helen looked wonderfully sweet to-day and an atmosphere of quiet calm seemed to pervade the room. It seemed to Morgan as if he had entered into a haven. Helen wore a simple grey gown that went well with her subdued demeanour. The sanity and soundness that underlay her occasional frolicsomeness and high spirits became in that moment accentuated for him; and the almost superst.i.tious feeling he had experienced at seeing her at the theatre now returned to him, the feeling that she was possessed of some magic power to redeem him.
”I have been too shame-faced to come before,” he began. ”I knew I did not deserve to see you again.”
”Don't, please,” said Helen. ”If you make speeches of that kind you will force me to be flippant, quite against my sense of the fitness of things at this moment. Not that I want to be too tragic, but my state of mind is rather a complex one. What's yours?”
”Mine is a very simple one. I am just conscious of mere existence and of a heavy weight on my head.”
”I don't like your symptoms, Morgan. If I diagnose correctly, they mean nascent 'desperation.' Now, so long as I am in the world, you ought never to develop that disease.”
”But I omitted one important factor of my state of mind,” he confessed; ”and that is the knowledge that you _are_ in the world.”
”And does it take your attention off the weight of the load--just a little?”
”It is the one pleasant fact I have to dwell upon. But please talk a little about yourself. It will do me good.”
She, however, had little to tell him. His letter had dealt her a heavy blow. His silence about the details of his sudden action had made her the prey of her imagination, which had created frightful possibilities. Her favourite theory had been--an indiscretion committed by him in some moment of depression and a remorse that had resulted in a marriage with some vile person. But she had been somewhat rea.s.sured at seeing him go into the theatre one day in company with Cleo. That had been a pure accident, of course, but it had enabled her to divine a good deal. Cleo's appearance--she had taken particular notice of her face--had at least narrowed that vast dreadfulness which had till then tortured her. But it was a face that by no means pleased her.
”However,” continued Helen, ”it seems I've been talking about you instead of about myself. I have been living, I suppose, in the usual conventional routine. My conduct has been really most exemplary and the austerest chaperon would have patted me on the head approvingly.
Oh, no, I forget. There's one little matter over which I should have got lectured and that is my rejection of so eligible a bachelor as Mr.
Ingram, on the mere ground that I couldn't overlook his past life.
Anyhow, he hasn't committed suicide, though I fancy he has done something worse.”
”You mean he has followed my example?” suggested Morgan.
”Not anything as bad as that. You know I'm only the daughter of a country gentleman and the widow of a baronet. Well, he has consoled himself by marrying the genuine brand of aristocracy, though she's a _divorcee_. Her income's double mine; her intelligence one-tenth of mine.”
”She must be a very brilliant woman, indeed.”
”You have developed courtly qualities, I perceive. But I am quite ready to concede, on re-consideration, that her intellect is only the hundredth part of mine. You know I am frightfully conceited about my brains. But now tell me how everything came to happen? Where did you meet her?”
He recollected that Ingram was implicated in the recital and could not be kept out. But he was in a mood when he could no longer keep back anything. He hungered for every crumb of sympathy he could get, and, besides, he looked upon things now with such changed eyes that such reservations relating to his personal life as he had before set up seemed futile and meaningless. Very soon Helen had learned how his connection with Ingram had begun and developed, by what strange chance the letter he had written to him had spun the first thread of the web in which he was now floundering, and how he had sought to lose himself in the apparent dreamland before him. Helen's eyes were fixed on him as her quick brain seized on every point. The narration came to her as a complete revelation.
”And if I hadn't insisted on your dining that evening,” she cried, ”you would never have got into this purgatory of a dreamland.”
”I think I should have got there all the same,” he answered, smiling, conscious of how much good it was doing him to talk to his dear friend again. ”I must have met Ingram sooner or later and then the same thing would have happened.”
”Ingram is a blackguard!” said Helen severely. ”With all his thick-headed cleverness, he had yet insight enough to know that you would be taken with that creature. Probably he knew already how your letter had impressed her and that she was curious about you. And so he reckoned to play on your temperament, hoping that might prove an easy method of ending his connection with her. Why, he must have jumped at the idea of taking you to her.”
Morgan was rather apologetic on Ingram's behalf, pleading that he must have yielded to the sudden temptation and was not really such a Machiavellian fellow.
”There have been times when, I feel sure, he spoke to me from his heart. But I do not feel revengeful against him, so let him be dead and buried, so far as we are concerned.”