Part 5 (1/2)

”I married a long while ago.” She stood in front of him like a slim child. It seemed impossible. ”Yes, before I knew anything--to get away from home. Our marriage did not go smoothly. After three years I ran away--oh, not with any one I cared for; he happened to be there, that was all. After a month he deserted me in Italy. I have fortunately some money of my own and a few friends who did not turn me down--Lady Splay, for instance. There!”

She moved to a table and poured out for Hillyard a whisky-and-soda.

”My question was thoughtless,” he said. ”I did not mean that you should answer it as you did.”

”I preferred you to know.”

”I am honoured,” Hillyard replied.

Stella Croyle sat down upon a low stool in front of the fire. Hillyard sank into one of the deep-cus.h.i.+oned chairs. The day of tension was over, and there was no doubt about the success of ”The Dark Tower.” Stella Croyle sat very quietly, with the firelight playing upon her face and her delicate dress. Her vivacity had dropped from her like the pretty cloak she had thrown aside. Both became her well, but they were for use out-of-doors, and Hillyard was grateful that she had discarded them.

”You are tired, no doubt,” he said, reluctantly. ”I ought to go.”

”No,” she answered. ”It is pleasant before the fire here.”

”Thank you. I should like to stay for a little while. I did not know until I came into this room with how much anxiety I had been looking forward to this night.”

He leaned forward with his hands clenched, and saw pa.s.s in the bright coals glimpses of the long tale of days when endeavour was fruitless and hopes were disappointed. ”Success! Lord, how I wanted it!” he whispered.

Stella Croyle looked at him with a smile.

”It was sure to come to you, since you wanted it enough,” she said.

”Yes, but in time?” exclaimed Hillyard.

”In time for what?”

Hillyard broke into a laugh.

”I don't know,” he answered. He was silent for a little while, and the comfort of the room, the quiet of the night, the pleasant sympathy of Stella Croyle, all wrought upon him. ”I don't know,” he repeated slowly.

”I am waiting. But out of my queer life something more has got to come--something more and something different. I have always been sure of it, but I used to be afraid that the opportunity would come while I was still chained to the handles of the barrow.”

Hillyard's life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.

His father, a partner in a small firm of s.h.i.+pping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fas.h.i.+oned business, had moved in Martin's boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another. The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its cla.s.s-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four. No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred's, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school's traditions. The school meant so many lessons in so many cla.s.s-rooms, and no more.

Hillyard was the only child. Between himself and his parents there was little sympathy and understanding. He saw them at meals, and fled from the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.

”You never heard of such a jumble of books,” he said to Stella Croyle.

”Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt of Islam, Tennyson. I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart--absolutely every line of it, and pages of Browning. The little brown books! I would walk miles to pick one of them up. My people would find the books lying about the house, and couldn't make head or tail of why I wanted to read them. There were two red-letter days: one when I first bought the two volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey. That's the author to bowl a boy over. The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the Confessions--I could never get tired of them. I remember buying an ounce of laudanum at a chemist's on London Bridge and taking it home, with the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to drink it out of a decanter.”

Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now with parted lips.

”And did you?” she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.

Hillyard shook his head.

”The taste was too unpleasant. I drank about half an ounce and threw the rest away. I was saved from that folly.”

Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.