Part 7 (1/2)

No doubt he knew this, and felt that her sharing would be disturbing by its violence. In the ordinary course of events I suppose he expected that she would have another child, but as this interest was denied her, she was thrown more and more upon her own resources.

Her promise to Mrs. Payne gave her a reasonable excuse for her growing interest in Arthur. She had never returned to the card-playing incident; but as time went on a number of others equally distressing presented themselves. Having const.i.tuted herself his special protectress and the saviour of his reputation she tackled each of them with courage. In every case she found herself baffled by the fact that arguments which seemed to her unanswerable made no appeal to him, not because he wasn't anxious to see things with her eyes, but because they came within the area of a kind of blind-spot in his brain. She soon found that she couldn't appeal on moral grounds to an a-moral intelligence. She would have appealed on grounds material, but it seemed to be ironically decreed that material and moral grounds should be rarely at one. Sweet persuasion was equally useless. And indeed, how could she expect to succeed by her influence where maternal love had failed so signally? Even so, she would not own herself beaten. It was tantalising; for the more she saw of Arthur the better she liked him, and in these days she was seeing a good deal of him.

The opportunity arose from Arthur's trouble. He had told her the truth when he said his fellow-pupils at Lapton were already aware of his lack of honour in games. Nothing is less easily forgiven by boys, and when the others discovered that he cheated and lied, not so much by accident as on principle, they began to treat him as an outcast from their decent society. The Traceys went so far as to report his failing to Considine. An unpleasant _contretemps_, but one that Considine had expected. He explained to them that Payne was not entirely to blame, and that his const.i.tution was not normal. He advised them to take the weakness for granted. Even when he did this he knew that such distinctions were unlikely to be acceptable to a boyish code of honour.

On the other hand the special fees that Mrs. Payne was paying him were essential to the development of his plans. As a compromise he decided to keep Arthur apart from the others in their amus.e.m.e.nts in the most natural way he could devise. Practically for want of a better solution he handed him over to the care of Gabrielle.

Arthur resented this. He was fond of games and of sport. He liked winning and he liked killing; he thought it humiliating to his manly dignity to be relegated to Gabrielle's society. He wrote bitterly to his mother about it, using the contemptuous nickname that the boys had invented for Mrs. Considine.

”_I think old Considine,_” he wrote, ”_must be thinking of turning me into a nursemaid. I'm always being told off to help Gaby in the garden or take her for drives in the pony-cart. Not much fun taking a woman shopping!_”

But Gabrielle was glad of it. The new plan supplied her with the first prolonged companions.h.i.+p of a person of her own age--there were less than three years between them--that she had known. Little by little Arthur accepted it, and they became great friends.

It was a curious relation, for though it must have been simple on his side, on hers it was full of complication. To begin with his society was a great relief from her loneliness. Again, she had already, for want of another enthusiasm, conceived an acute interest in his curious temperament, and her eagerness to get to the bottom of it, and, if possible, to find a cure, was now fanned by something that resembled a maternal pa.s.sion. They spent the greater part of his spare time together, and often, at hours when he would normally have been working with Considine, she would ask for him to take her driving into Totnes or Dartmouth, their two market towns. In the evenings they would walk out together in search of air along the lip of the basin in which Lapton Manor lay.

On one of these evening walks a strange thing happened. They had climbed the hills and had sat for a few minutes on the summit watching the sun go down behind the level ridges that lead inward from the Start. While they were sitting there in silence, Arthur suddenly slipped away over the brim of a little hollow full of bracken on the edge of the wood. A moment later Gabrielle heard him laughing, and walked over quietly to see what he was doing. She saw him crouched, quite unconscious of her presence, among the ferns at the bottom of the hollow. He had caught a baby rabbit, and now he was torturing the small terrified creature, its beady eyes set with fear, just as a cat plays with a mouse. He was watching it intently: letting it escape to the verge of freedom and then catching it and throwing it violently back. For a second it would lie motionless with terror and then make another feeble attempt at escape. She watched this display of animal cruelty with horror, and yet she could not speak, for she wanted to see what he would do next. At last the rabbit refused to keep up the heartless game any longer. It simply lay and trembled. Arthur prodded it with his foot, but it would not move. This appeared to incense him.

He took a flying kick at the poor beast and killed it. It lay for a moment twitching, its muzzle covered in blood. A little thing no bigger than a kitten two months old----

Gabrielle ran to him flaming with anger. She picked up the mutilated rabbit and hugged it to her breast.

”Why did you do that? You beast, you devil!” she cried.

She could have flown at him in her anger. Arthur only laughed. He stood there laughing, staring straight at her with his wide honest eyes.

”It's dead. It's all right,” he said.

Her fingers were all dabbled with the blood of the rabbit that twitched no longer. She could do nothing. She dropped the carcase with a pitiful gesture of despair and burst into bitter tears.

She sat sobbing on the edge of the hollow. She could not see him, but presently she heard his voice, curiously shaken with emotion, at her side.

”I say, Mrs. Considine,” he said. ”Don't--please don't--I simply can't stand it.”

”Oh, get away--leave me alone,” she sobbed. ”I can't bear you to be near me. It was so little. So happy----”

He wouldn't go. He spoke again, and his voice was quite changed--she had never heard a note of feeling in it before. ”I can't bear it.

You--I can't bear that you should suffer. I swear I won't do a thing like that again--not if it hurts you. On my honour I won't.”

”Yes, you will. I suppose you can't help it. It's awful. You haven't a soul. You aren't human.”

His voice choked as he replied. ”I swear it--I do really. I could do anything for you, Mrs. Considine. I feel that I could. For G.o.d's sake try me!”

She compelled herself, still sobbing, to look at him. She saw that his face was tortured, and his eyes full of tears. But she could say no more, and they walked home in silence.

XIV

This distressing picture troubled Gabrielle for several days, and yet, beneath her remembrance of anger and disgust, she could not help feeling a curious excitement when she reflected that, for the first time since she had known him, Arthur had shown her signs of pity and tenderness. For a little while they lived under its shadow though neither of them spoke of it again. Arthur, in particular, was awkward; but whether he were ashamed of his cruelty, or merely of the effect that it had produced on her, she could not say. Although she found it difficult to believe in the first explanation she was deeply touched, and perhaps a little flattered, by the possibility of the second.

Certainly his att.i.tude toward her had changed. In everything that he said or did, he now seemed pathetically anxious to please her, and even this was encouraging. She didn't tell Considine what had happened.

She knew very well that he would consider the incident trivial and, in a few words, shatter her illusion of its significance. And this fear proved that she was not so very sure that it was significant herself.

The curious atmosphere that now developed between them revealed itself more particularly in the letters which they were both of them writing to Mrs. Payne at Overton. Arthur's had never been very fluent, but Gabrielle had found an outlet for herself in this correspondence. In his early letters from Lapton Arthur had rarely mentioned Gabrielle; whenever he had done so it had been half contemptuously, as though the feeling of repression which emanates from the best of schoolmasters had attached itself to the schoolmaster's wife. At the same time Gabrielle had been brief, but extremely natural. With the card-playing incident a new situation had developed. Arthur, as we have seen, had been inclined to turn up his nose at Gabrielle's society when it was thrust upon him by Considine, while Gabrielle had given signs of a more maternal care. In the later stages of this period Gabrielle, being taken as a matter of course, had practically dropped out of Arthur's letters. The episode of the rabbit changed all this, for while Arthur now began to expand in a nave enthusiasm, Gabrielle's attempts at writing about him fell altogether flat. Judging by her letters Mrs.