Part 21 (1/2)

She faced him with a little wrinkle of thought between her brows and spoke with an air of wisdom which went very prettily with the childlike beauty of her face.

”You are my friend,” she said, ”a friend I am very grateful for, but you are not more than that to me. I am frank. You see, I am thinking now of reasons which would not trouble me if I loved you. Marriage with me would do you no good, would hurt you in your career.”

”No,” he protested.

”But I am thinking that it would,” she replied, steadily, ”and I do not believe that I should give much thought to it, if I really loved you. I am thinking of something else, too--” and she spoke more boldly, choosing her words with care--”of a plan which before you came I had formed, of a task which before you came I had set myself to do. I am still thinking of it, still feeling that I ought to go on with it. I do not think that I should feel that if I loved. I think nothing else would count at all except that I loved. So you are still my friend, and I cannot go with you.”

Chayne looked at her for a moment sadly, with a mist before his eyes.

”I leave you to much unhappiness,” he said, ”and I hate the thought of it.”

”Not quite so much now as before you came,” she answered. ”I am proud, you know, that you asked me,” and putting her troubles aside, she smiled at him bravely, as though it was he who needed comforting. ”Good-by! Let me hear of you through your success.”

So again they said good-by at the time of sunset. Chayne mounted into the landau and drove back along the road to Weymouth. ”So that's the end,” said Sylvia. She opened the door and pa.s.sed again into the garden.

Through the window of the library she saw her father and Walter Hine, watching, it seemed, for her appearance. It was borne in upon her suddenly that she could not meet them or speak with them, and she ran very quickly round the house to the front door, and escaped unaccosted to her room.

In the library Hine turned to Garratt Skinner with one of his rare flashes of shrewdness.

”She didn't want to meet us,” he said, jealously. ”Do you think she cares for him?”

”I think,” replied Garratt Skinner with a smile, ”that Captain Chayne will not trouble us with his company again.”

CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD Pa.s.sION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET

Garratt Skinner, however, was wrong. He was not aware of the great revolution which had taken place in Chayne; and he misjudged his tenacity. Chayne, like many another man, had mapped out his life only to find that events would happen in a succession different to that which he had ordained. He had arranged to devote his youth and the earlier part of his manhood entirely to his career, if the career were not brought to a premature end in the Alps. That possibility he had always foreseen. He took his risks with full knowledge, setting the gain against them, and counting them worth while. If then he lived, he proposed at some indefinite time, in the late thirties, to fall in love and marry. He had no parents living; there was the empty house upon the Suss.e.x Downs; and the small estate which for generations had descended from father to son.

Marriage was thus a recognized event. Only it was thrust away into an indefinite future. But there had come an evening which he had not foreseen, when, sorely grieved by the loss of his great friend, he had fallen in with a girl who gave with open hands the sympathy he needed, and claimed, by her very reticence and humility, his sympathy in return.

A day had followed upon that evening; and thenceforth the image of Sylvia standing upon the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d'Argentiere, with a few strips of white cloud sailing in a blue sky overhead, the ma.s.sive pile of Mont Blanc in front, freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained fixed and riveted in his thoughts. He began in imagination to refer matters of moment to her judgment; he began to save up little events of interest that he might remember to tell them to her. He understood that he had a companion, even when he was alone, a condition which he had not antic.i.p.ated even for his late thirties. And he came to the conclusion that he had not that complete ordering of his life on which he had counted. He was not, however, disappointed. He seized upon the good thing which had come to him with a great deal of wonder and a very thankful heart; and he was not disposed to let it lightly go.

Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to a.s.sume, the unattractive figure of ”red-hot” Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner expected. Chayne, instead of turning his back upon so distasteful a company, frequented it in the resolve to take Sylvia out of its grasp. It did not need a lover to see that she slept little of nights and pa.s.sed distressful days. She had fled from her mother's friends at Chamonix, only to find herself helpless amongst a worse gang in her father's house. Very well. She must be released. He had proposed to take her away then and there. She had refused. Well, he had been blunt. He would go about the business in the future in a more delicate way. And so he came again and again to the little house under the hill where the stream babbled through the garden, and every day the apples grew redder upon the boughs.

But it was disheartening work. His position indeed became difficult, and it needed all his tenacity to enable him to endure it. The difficulty became very evident one afternoon early in August, and the afternoon was, moveover, remarkable in that Garratt Skinner was betrayed into a revelation of himself which was to bear consequences of gravity in a future which he could not foresee. Chayne rode over upon that afternoon, and found Garratt Skinner alone and, according to his habit, stretched at full-length in his hammock with a cigar between his lips. He received Captain Chayne with the utmost geniality. He had long since laid aside his ineffectual vulgarity of manner.

”You must put up with me, Captain Chayne,” he said. ”My daughter is out.

However, she--I ought more properly to say, they--will be back no doubt before long.”

”They being--”

”Sylvia and Walter Hine.”

Chayne nodded his head. He had known very well who ”they” must be, but he had not been able to refrain from the question. Jealousy had hold of him.

He knew nothing of Sylvia's determination to acquire a power greater than her father's over the vain and defenceless youth. The words with which she had hinted her plan to him had been too obscure to convey their meaning. He was simply aware that Sylvia more and more avoided him, more and more sought the companions.h.i.+p of Walter Hine; and such experience as he had, taught him that women were as apt to be blind in their judgment of men as men in their estimation of women.

He sought now to enlist Garratt Skinner on his side, and drawing a chair nearer to the hammock he sat down.

”Mr. Skinner,” he said, speaking upon an impulse, ”you have no doubt in your mind, I suppose, as to why I come here so often.”