Part 12 (2/2)
”I am sorry to say Carstairs could not bring himself to believe in his wife's innocence. He was in India at the time, you know, and only got home--on special leave--when the case was coming on. Heaven knows on what grounds he bases his doubts of her. One would have thought it impossible for a man to live with a woman like Chloe and not know her incapable of the deed. But human nature is a strange thing----” He broke off.
”I understand they do not contemplate keeping house together for the future?” Anstice hoped he was not appearing unduly curious, but Sir Richard's manner invited interest.
”No--though mind you, Carstairs has not left his wife because she was unfortunate enough to be convicted and sent to prison. He's not that sort. If he could have believed her innocent he would have stuck to her through thick and thin. As it is he gives her the house, a large allowance, which permits motor-cars and things of that kind, and since he is known to be in India a good many people don't know they are really living apart in a double sense.”
”Yet he can't believe in her?”
”No--and that's why he will not live with her. In his own rather peculiar way he has a remarkably high code of honour, and since he genuinely believes her to be guilty it would doubtless be quite impossible for him to live with her again.”
”I am rather surprised--seeing she must know his opinion of her--that she condescends to live in his house and take his money,” said Anstice, voicing a question which had caused him a very real and acute wonder.
”I'm glad you have raised that point,” said Sir Richard quickly. ”She does it for the sake of the child, so that Cherry may have all the advantages of wealth. Chloe herself has nothing and Carstairs is a rich man; so it is an eminently proper arrangement, and in my opinion Chloe behaved like a sensible woman in agreeing to it.”
He threw away his cigar, which had gone out as he talked.
”No--what I wonder at is that Chloe should deliberately choose to come back here where the whole story is known. It's not bravado, of that I'm certain, but it beats me altogether how she can do it, for as you know women can be uncommonly cruel sometimes, and these creatures here aren't by any means charitably disposed towards her.”
”You allow Miss Wayne to visit her?”
”Yes--and I welcome her to my house on the rare occasions she honours me by entering it,” said Sir Richard with evident sincerity; and Anstice felt oddly gratified by the other man's speech.
A clock striking seven brought him to his feet in genuine dismay.
”Seven o'clock! I'd no idea it was so late! Pray excuse me inflicting myself on you all this time.”
”Must you go?” Sir Richard rose too, and stood regarding the tall, loosely built figure with something like admiration. ”Well, you're a busy man, I know; and if you really must go I'll not detain you. But you'll come in again, won't you? Come to dinner--Iris shall send you a note--and drop in for a smoke any evening you're at liberty.”
The invitation so heartily given was accepted with a pleasure to which Anstice had long been a stranger; and then he said good-bye to his kind host and left Greengates feeling that he had found two unexpectedly congenial friends in Iris Wayne and her father.
He had been deeply, genuinely interested in Sir Richard's story, that unhappy story in which Chloe Carstairs figured so tragically; yet as he made his way homewards between the blossoming hedgerows his mind dwelt upon another woman, a younger, happier woman than the pale mistress of Cherry Orchard. And the face which floated before his eyes in the starlit spring dusk was the laughing, grey-eyed face of Iris Wayne.
CHAPTER V
As the weeks pa.s.sed Anstice's acquaintance with the Waynes ripened into something which he found strangely pleasant.
Although he had long ago decided that for him the simple human things of life, friends.h.i.+p, social intercourse with the world of men and women, were, since that bygone Indian morning, forbidden, even his acquired misanthropy was not proof against the kindly advances made to him by Sir Richard and his daughter.
Busy as he was, he still found time to accept some of their invitations to Greengates, and he and Sir Richard enjoyed a quiet chat over their cigars now and again when by chance he had an evening to himself.
On their side the Waynes found him, each in his and her own degree, an agreeable companion. Sir Richard approved of his quiet and reserved manner, and was not inclined to quarrel with his occasional fits of moodiness--for there were times when the ghosts which haunted him refused to be exorcised, and Anstice felt himself unfit, by reason of the handicap which Fate had imposed upon him, to mingle with the happy, the careless, the innocent ones of the earth.
To Sir Richard, kind-hearted, uncritical, undiscerning, such fits of silence, even of gloom, were natural enough in a man whose life was spent largely in the service of the sick and suffering among humanity.
He was probably worried over some difficult case, Sir Richard concluded, when he found the younger man's conversation halting, his manner absent, or, on rare occasions, morose; and it must be noted that as a rule Anstice had too much respect for his friends to inflict these moods upon them. As for Iris, quicker of discernment than her father, of a more a.n.a.lytical turn of mind, she guessed that the changing moods which characterized her new acquaintance were not induced by any external or professional worries, but were the marks of a trouble far more serious, far more vital to the man himself. Of the nature of this trouble Iris had naturally no very clear idea, though now and again she considered the probability of him having been what she called, rather school-girlishly, crossed in love. But though her phraseology might be childish there was something purely womanly in the compa.s.sion with which she thought of Anstice; and on one occasion when a fit of melancholy had overcome him unexpectedly in her presence, he was startled, not to say dismayed, to notice something of this half-tender, half-impersonal pity in the soft, brooding glance of her eyes as they rested on him for a moment.
It was not with the Waynes alone that he grew more intimate as the days went by. A short time after his introduction to Greengates Anstice received a summons to Cherry Orchard, and on repairing thither found that his patient on this occasion was Cherry Carstairs. With all her demure dignity Cherry was at times possessed of a very spirit of perversity; and being, although of such tender years, absolutely devoid of fear, she had tried conclusions in secret with a s.h.a.ggy pony in a field close by her home, with the result that, owing to the pony's stubborn refusal to allow her to climb upon his back, Cherry received a kick, more in sorrow than in anger, which snapped the bone in her tiny forearm, and sent her stumbling home, very pale and shaky, her dignity sadly in abeyance, to seek her mother.
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