Chapter VII

Miss Mellicot behaved extremely well. She did not go away at once, and she never in Anthony’s presence referred to Kitty. What she said to Daphne on the subject of Kitty, in the privacy of her bedroom, might have been taken from the most outspoken of the classics. She had not been to Girton for nothing.

Miss Mellicot was direct, and in her quiet and ladylike voice she stripped the career of Kitty Costrelle of all the pity and tenderness with which Daphne had attempted to cover it.

“It does not do to sentimentalize about facts, Daphne,” Ruth told her. “This is the kind of girl you have chosen for a friend, and your brother, whose judgment is much less sound than I thought, has had to take the consequences.”

“As if,” Daphne said afterward indignantly to Jim, “you could arrange human beings in pockets, like cocoa—so much hot water to so much sugar—and know exactly what kind of cup you were going to get at the end of it.”

But at the time Daphne could think of no evasive comparisons. She was crushed under the weight of fact. She had gone to Ruth’s bedroom because she was afraid that Ruth would be unhappy, but Ruth was not unhappy. She was very seldom unhappy, and she was almost invariably right.

Jimmy drove Miss Mellicot to the station at the end of the week, when her visit came to a not too noticeable close.

Anthony had meant to fulfil this office, but he came in so late for lunch that he had to be left in the dining-room with some reproachfully cold mince.

Anthony assured himself that he was under no obligation to Miss Mellicot, and that she was far too sensible a woman to suppose that he was; but as he stood by the French window in the dining-room watching her drive off with Jim, he felt a little uncomfortable.

Miss Mellicot looked very well in a high dog-cart. Her veils and pins never betrayed her, and she kept her hat on without visible effort. These traits are indicative of character, the kind of character which Anthony particularly liked; and yet when the dog-cart had disappeared from view behind the laurel-bushes, Anthony returned to his cold mince with a sigh of unmistakable relief.

He had kept his own counsel for forty-eight hours while he considered that he was thinking things over. Anthony told himself that he was not going to act precipitately about Kitty. He was going to ask Daphne a few straight questions first.

When he had finished his lunch he went out into the garden to ask them. Merry Gardens was not an old place, like Pannell; it was a comfortable, two-storied house, which rambled conveniently enough between a cedar-tree on a small, sloping lawn to the edge of the fields, which swallowed it up on three sides.

Daphne lay in a hammock under the cedar-tree planning new beds for the following spring. It was an absorbing occupation, and peculiarly difficult to carry on in a hammock, owing to the size of garden-books, the fluttering quality of catalogues, and the hopelessness (in a hammock) of once letting go of a pencil.

She did not hear Anthony approach, and he sat for some time gazing straight in front of him before he broached the question of Kitty. His eyes absorbed the pleasant, easy landscape of Rochett.

Essex is supposed to be an ugly county by those who do not live in it, but it contrives, once you get away from the endless ramifications of Liverpool Street Station, to have a very pretty little air of its own. It is like one of those women who, without being showily attractive, know how to carry their heads.

As a county it frequently ignores its reputation for flatness, and breaks away into the roundness of small, covered hills, and no one has ever accused Essex of not being green.

From the cedar-tree on the lawn the fields sloped softly away into innumerable folds of wooded copse and distant orchards. The rich pasture-lands glowed in the mild April sunshine with a light that was all their own. It had none of the emphatic clarity of the South, or the delicate, fine shades of northern Europe; it was a soft and lovely coloring that caused in Anthony an unexpected tightening of the heart.

When he had been given six weeks’ solitary confinement in a whitewashed cell for making too many complaints about the condition of his camp, he had been haunted by just such a landscape. He slipped his hand out to touch the rough bark of the cedar, to make sure of himself. He did not want to wake up suddenly and find the picture fade.

He wanted to keep the green blur of fields, the small group of cottages looking as if they were a thatched and mossy plant native to the soil itself, and the spire of the thick-set church across the village green safe in his eyes forever. Something in the tension of his figure caught his sister’s attention. She looked up quickly.

“Oh, Anthony,” she said, “how quietly you came out and how still you are! You look as if you were holding everything still with you, except, of course, my catalogues of Dutch bulbs. The attempts they make to get over the side of the hammock nobody could control. Poor Ruth! Did you see her drive away? She’s so nice, really. I half hoped, and half didn’t hope, you’d like her.”

“That,” said Anthony, feeling suddenly freed from the fixity of his attention, “was exactly how I liked her. Would you mind telling me why you asked Miss Costrelle not to come here during my visit? She made me feel rather a fool when she told me it was your arrangement to keep her out of the house while I was here. Did you suppose I couldn’t keep my head with a pretty girl, or had you anything in particular against her? Forgive me for asking you, but I want to make up my mind about going to see her. I haven’t been yet, you know. I felt I couldn’t; but I’d rather like to now, unless there is some very definite reason against it.”

“I wasn’t thinking of your head being turned,” said Daphne, slowly. She knew this question would come, and she had tried to prepare herself to meet it; but she wished that Jimmy were with her to give her the security of his admiration. She felt her tact might be a little fallible before Anthony’s keen, gray eyes. “I was thinking most, I suppose, of poor little Kitty. But of course I thought of you, too, Anthony; I didn’t want you to be disturbed. You’ve got so many new things to get used to, and Kitty would be rather a tremendous new one if you really got intimate with her. She wouldn’t be like Ruth, an experience you can take or leave in cold blood.”

“I don’t wish to take life like a nursing home,” interrupted Anthony a little unfairly, for Ruth was not like a nursing home. “But why ‘poor Kitty’? You might tell me, I think, a little more about Miss Costrelle.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you anything,” agreed Daphne, rapidly, “anything I can, of course, and I know what you mean about life; only there’s rather a difference between taking it like a nursing home and taking it like the Niagara Rapids.

“Jimmy knew Kitty first, before he knew me, you know, and one day he told me about her, after her lover was killed. Jimmy was sure he was killed in 1914. Kitty was awfully plucky. She drove a motor-ambulance in France for two years without a break. She was considered one of their very best drivers. She never seemed to mind what she did or where she went, or what she saw; she seemed made of iron and fire. And then, of course, she broke down. No one could have stood her unrelenting work, and no one could stop her. When she stopped she just gave up everything—hope and her old habits and her work. She came back here, an unprotected little flame, burning whatever she came across. Nothing could persuade her to settle down or take up any fresh interests.

“Her father is a perfect old rip who used to own most of the land about here. He has succeeded in getting rid of all of it except an old farm-house he fortunately settled on Kitty as a present when she came of age. She lives there now, on and off, with an old nurse, and a French cook she picked up on her travels, and I believe her father turns up occasionally for week-ends. The greater part of his life is spent in London with a queer collection of blackguards and anonymous ladies.

“Jimmy and I have tried awfully hard to get Kitty received in the neighborhood. She used to be, of course, but now people are inclined to cold-shoulder her. She won’t go to church or do any of the usual things, and of course, as you see for yourself, she flirts with every man she comes across. I knew, if she saw you, she’d at least attempt it with you, and I don’t believe you know how to flirt—do you, Anthony?—properly.”

“I’m not at all sure I couldn’t learn,” said Anthony, consideringly, lighting a cigarette. “Of course it was quite sensible of you and Jim to try to get her out of my way; but now that she’s come and seen and conquered what do you propose to do about it?”

“What do you want me to do about it?” asked Daphne. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“That’s what I want you to do,” said Anthony, throwing away his match—“leave us alone. I won’t do Miss Costrelle any particular harm if I can help it, but I don’t propose to cut her acquaintance merely because she has had an unfortunate bringing-up and indulges in a risqué manner. It will be an interesting experience for me to know a flirt.”

Daphne said nothing. If this was the result of forty-eight hours’ solid reflection on the part of Anthony, she doubted if anything she could say would add to the weight of it.

Anthony felt sure from his knowledge of women that if Daphne had anything to urge against Kitty, she would very properly have urged it. She would not have invented adverse facts, but she would have stated picturesquely what adverse facts there were. He argued from her silence that there was none. He was relieved by Daphne’s account of Kitty, and he did not realize that he had intended to be relieved by whatever account of Kitty he received.

He met Kitty on his way to the farm. She was driving a two-seated, rakish car round a precipitous corner. She pulled up when she saw him.

“Your brother-in-law is a splendid whip,” she observed. “I came right on to him suddenly at the end of Clatter’s Lane. I didn’t do it on purpose, but there’s an awfully sharp turn, and I wasn’t expecting anything. I got by without touching the cart, but Polly bolted. Miss Mellicot didn’t scream. She just held her hat on most sensibly. She wears rather hard hats, doesn’t she? Jim swore.”

“Did you happen to see the result of Polly’s bolting?” Anthony asked with what gravity he could muster.

Kitty had on a purple slouch hat drawn nearly over her eyes, and tied by a long, purple scarf. She wore amethyst ear-rings, and a big bunch of Neapolitan violets was pinned to her breast. These facts served to reduce the anxiety with which Anthony waited to hear the fate of the dog-cart.

“Oh, Jimmy must have got her in hand all right,” said Kitty, easily. “They’d be back by now in pieces if he hadn’t. You ought to have driven Miss Mellicot to the station yourself, you know, Captain Arden. I do think it was rather shabby of you not to. Do you want to have a spin in my car? I’ll take you if Daphne knows you were coming to see me. You were coming to see me, weren’t you?”

Anthony nodded, and got into the car. Kitty turned it toward the distant hills without waiting for a further answer.

“Daphne knows perfectly,” said Anthony at length, “what my plans are, and she’s been telling me all about you.”

Kitty kept her eyes on the road without speaking. They flew along in silence for a few minutes. Then she said in a curious, flat little voice:

“Whatever she said was true, you know, Captain Arden.”

“She might have told me,” said Anthony as they shot through the village and tore breathlessly to left and right down country lanes and palpitating commons, “that you habitually exceeded the speed limit.”

“I wonder she didn’t tell you that,” said Kitty, with a sudden dimple. “But perhaps she thought that, as you were so very clever, you would have guessed it. D’you mind how fast we go?”

Anthony shook his head. He wasn’t going to explain to Kitty what it felt like, after sitting for two years in a small compound watching a man with a gun on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, with a wall beyond it, to be melting through space with the rapidity of a flying cloud.

He was not sure that he was afraid, but the sense of habitual unreality which possessed him was sharper than ever before. He felt as if some fine cord connecting him with the universe had been severed, and that he might at any moment find himself carried off into bottomless space. He lost the sense of his own body, and held on to his racing mind with all the strength that was left in him.

It was difficult to talk while Kitty was driving. She shaved disaster habitually by the turn of a hair; her small, steady hand barely touched the steering-wheel; her eyes ate up the oncoming road with a searching eagerness.

There were moments when it seemed to Anthony that she was not aware of what she was doing: she drove in a trance of speed. The wind caught her hair and blew it flat against her face, then lifted it suddenly, revealing her long-lashed, sparkling eyes, shining as water shines when trees are blown backward from a hidden pool. Her lips were parted with a fierce enjoyment. The purple scarf furled and unfurled itself against Anthony’s cheek.

Once or twice she turned her head toward him and laughed a little.

“Your nerve seems to be all right,” she assured him when they had escaped a donkey-cart by a miracle and hustled a perilous pathway through a herd of cows. “I wonder what it feels like to be afraid of being hurt,” she added speculatively. “I don’t mean disliking it. I dislike it myself intensely, but I can’t imagine not doing anything I wanted because I was afraid of anything, can you?”

“Yes, I can,” said Anthony, looking away from her. “I can imagine being afraid of all sorts of things—noises—angry voices, people’s eyes, not getting food when your whole body aches for it, thinking that perhaps you are going to be left without water, or seeing things that haven’t happened, but which you know _may_ happen. Look here, don’t let’s talk about fear, Miss Costrelle. It’s something that’s inside you, and fierce, like a wild beast in a cage; it’s all right if you keep the bars shut. I can manage all my wild beasts quite comfortably then, but I don’t want to feel as if any one’s hand was on the lock, fingering at the bars. Understand fear? I can understand any mortal thing about fear except people’s being able to overcome it. That I haven’t been able to understand. Do you despise me for being a coward, or think I shall get quite right with plenty of good hard exercise and a quart of milk a day?”

“Miss Mellicot said that, didn’t she?” asked Kitty.

She put on speed for a long stretch of flat road, and then looked at Anthony.

“Of course I don’t think you’re a coward,” she said. “I didn’t mean that kind of being afraid, though perhaps it helps you to understand the _personal-skin_ fear, which was what I did mean.”

“I have that, too,” said Anthony, quietly.

“Well,” said Kitty, gently, “if you have, you’ll just set your teeth and hold on. The people I mean don’t. They let their teeth and everything else go. They expect to be held on _to_. I know you aren’t like them; that’s why I want to be friends. It’s rather fine when you know how, isn’t it? I don’t mean being friends, but just setting your teeth and holding on. Would you prefer being a dormouse and sleeping through all your winters?”

“Ah, you’re not given the blessed chance,” said Anthony. “I’d close with the dormouse to-morrow, Miss Costrelle, if I had the choice; but it’s winters during which my imagination is particularly lively. Why do you drive with your gloves off? You’ll get your hands cold.”

“You can warm them if you like,” said Kitty, calmly, “turn and turn about. I can drive just as easily with my left hand. I like to see my rings when I’m driving.”

“It’s very nice of you,” said Anthony, “to make me such an offer; but I don’t propose to have any of your friends, or even enemies, witness—what shall I call them?—your gloveless vagaries.”

“You’re too particular,” said Kitty. “Other men aren’t so particular, Captain Arden.”

Anthony shot a vexed glance at her. Why was she like a charming, confidential child one moment, and an Eve with the hard knowledge of the ages in her the next?

“I don’t intend to treat you as you imply other men treat you,” he said coldly. “I have my own methods.”

“They treat me,” said Kitty, defiantly, “exactly as I intend to have them treat me. I believe you think that I’m a poor little persecuted angel half the time and a maddening little fool the other half. I’m nothing of the kind. I’m twenty-three, and I know my way about considerably better than you do. Shall I drop you here? We’ve come another way round. My house is up this lane and then to the right. Be rather careful how you turn, for I’m apt to come suddenly round the corner, and I always forget to sound my horn till afterward. I’m expecting my one and only parent just now, so I sha’n’t ask you in. He’s a very entertaining person. I can’t say you’re very entertaining yourself, Captain Arden, but I dare say I shall get used to you in time.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Anthony, “because it sounds as if you mean to give me time.”

Kitty pulled up to let him out. There was no one in the lane, and Anthony put his hand over hers and held it there.

She looked at him moodily with eyes which had suddenly turned dark and lifeless.

Anthony had never seen a face which depended so for its beauty upon its expression. When Kitty wished, her face became like a house with all its blinds down. She shut out everything, even her prettiness.

For a moment she looked like that now, speculative and sulky, as if she questioned Anthony’s possible worth to her, and was annoyed with him for not possessing it more obviously. Then she shrugged her shoulders and withdrew her hand.

“Oh, yes,” she said petulantly, “I suppose I do. You’re rather strong-minded and odd, and I dare say you’ll amuse me for a time. Only, for goodness’ sake, don’t try to take care of me or show me what I’m _not_ like and ought to be! I really couldn’t stand that. I’m just what I _am_, you know, and you’re just what you are, and that’s quite different.”

“And if you’ve done with some of those Neapolitan violets,” said Anthony, unexpectedly to himself, “you can hand them over to me.”

Kitty laughed, and unfastened the bunch.

“You can have them all,” she said. “Father will only ask who I put them on for!”

“I don’t want all,” explained Anthony, carefully; “I want exactly half.”

He took them from her as he spoke, and repinned the rest with a steady hand.

“You do pin flowers on nicely,” Kitty remarked. “I will say that for you. Most men expect pins to stick into space, and let the flowers dribble all over you. I suppose it’s because you’re a doctor. You have a wonderfully steady hand, Captain Arden, even for a doctor.”

“It’s just as well,” explained Anthony, laughing at her. “You should know that you are not as intoxicating as you appear to imagine. I’m very pleased to have the violets, but they don’t excite me.”

“That sounds rather like a challenge,” said Kitty, while the laughter shot back into her eyes again. “A dangerous kind of challenge for you to make, coming on the top of the violets.”

“Ah, but I got my half safely first,” said Anthony. “I ran no risk over it.”

“You got half of what I didn’t want,” agreed Kitty, still laughing. “Good-by, Captain Arden. Don’t be too sure about that risk.”

She shot away from him through the leafy lane. The boughs met over her head and hid her from his eyes. The lane seemed curiously still and empty after she had gone; almost as if the spring had followed her out of it.