Chapter V

“Well, thank heavens you haven’t forgotten how to hold your gun straight!” Lord Hinterleys remarked, a few days later, laying his hand affectionately upon his son’s shoulder. “It is always a treat to see you shoot, Gerald. I used to fancy myself when I was your age, but I could never have touched your performance to-day.”

“You mustn’t forget the difference in the guns, dad,” Gerald reminded him, “and the powder. You were pretty useful yourself at those last two drives.”

Lord Hinterleys mounted his pony.

“I brought down a beautiful high one at Smith’s corner,” he admitted.--“Are you sure, you people, that you wouldn’t like to have a car sent down? I shall be home in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, and Oliver could be here with the shooting brake whilst you are having a cup of tea with Mrs. Amos.”

No one, it appeared, was tired. Gerald shouldered his gun and passed his arm through Myrtile’s.

“Come along,” he invited, “we’ll go home through the forty-acre wood. It isn’t more than a mile. It seems to me we’ve been standing about all day.”

“I should like it very much,” Myrtile assented joyfully.

“We are all coming presently,” Mary remarked. “Amos is just making up the bag. Dad wants the exact figures. Don’t you want some tea, Myrtile? Lady Hadley and I are going to have some.”

Myrtile shook her head.

“I do not care for tea very much, as you know,” she said, “and I should like to walk with Gerald.”

“Showing thereby your good taste, my child,” Gerald observed, as they strolled off, “and also a wise regard for your digestion.”

“One sees so little of you nowadays,” Myrtile sighed. “You are all the time in London.”

“You’re not going to lecture me?”

“That would not be for me,” she said gravely. “If you think it well to be there, it is well. I am only glad that you are here to-day. It has made your father so happy.”

They crossed the meadow and entered the little wood. The path here was so narrow that Gerald took Myrtile’s arm again. He was quite unconscious that at his touch she shivered with emotion.

“Myrtile,” he confided, “I saw Chris yesterday.”

“Yes?”

“Poor old chap,” Gerald went on, “he looked absolutely done in. I made him come and have some dinner with me. I don’t think he meant to tell me, but it all came out in time. He told me about his visit here.”

She walked on, her head uplifted, her face a little tense.

“Yes?” she murmured.

“I’d no idea,” Gerald continued, “that he was seriously in love with you, Myrtile. He’s such a sober sort of chap really--no lady friends, you know, or anything of that sort. When he takes a fancy to any one, it’s a serious affair.”

“He is not like you, Gerald,” she said quietly.

“You’re quite right, he isn’t,” Gerald acknowledged frankly. “We all have our different hobbies. I candidly admit that the society of your sex has been one of mine. Christopher has never been like that, though. You are his first love, Myrtile.”

“It is a great pity,” she declared.

“You used to seem very fond of him,” Gerald hazarded, “and he certainly looked after you jolly well at Monte Carlo.”

“Do you mean,” Myrtile asked calmly, “when he came to your room in the Hôtel de Paris, after the supper party?”

Gerald was completely taken aback. She had turned and was looking at him with her large, serious eyes. She was deliberately forcing upon him the memory of an episode which he had slurred over in his mind.

“I wasn’t thinking of that altogether,” he replied, with a certain rare awkwardness. “All the same----”

“All the same, what, please?” she insisted, after a moment’s pause. “I should like you to finish your sentence.”

“Well, from old Chris’s point of view, he was doing the chivalrous thing, and all that,” Gerald explained clumsily. “He must have thought, of course, that I was going to be a perfect brute.”

“Were you not?” she asked.

He was amazed at her coolness. She, whose purity seemed rather to increase with her larger knowledge of the world, seemed to be forcing him to speak of those very ugly moments.

“I am afraid that I can’t say what would have happened,” he admitted. “I was very much attracted by you, and you hadn’t the faintest idea what it all meant. So, you see, you do owe him a very great debt of gratitude, Myrtile.”

“I do not think so,” she replied.

Gerald was more startled than ever. Her deliberate speech seemed to him almost a challenge.

“You are about the only person in the world who would say that,” he observed.

“Perhaps so,” she admitted. “Perhaps, too, I am the only one who is in a position to know.”

Gerald was poignantly interested. He looked down at her face, calm and serious. There was no added colour in her cheeks, no sign of any confusion.

“You mean that you are sorry that Christopher interfered? That you would have risked my forgetting--all that I ought to have remembered?”

“I am sorry that Christopher interfered,” she said distinctly. “At that moment I loved you, and I did not know that it was wicked for me to love you. If afterwards you had got tired of me, as you would have done, then I should have killed myself when I understood. But I should have been happy first.”

“But aren’t you happy now?” he asked.

“I am very contented,” she answered, “and I am very, very grateful. I think that no one in the world has ever received such wonderful kindness as I have. But happiness, it seems to me, is a thing apart. It is a great and a wonderful and a rare gift. I do not think that very many people possess it, although they think they do. I should have possessed it, for however short a time, if Christopher had not interfered.”

Gerald was staggered. It seemed to him that this girl, walking so sedately by his side, had suddenly become his monitress; was trying to explain to him, as though he were a pupil, great and elemental things.

“Myrtile,” he declared, “you surprise me very much. I never dreamed that you would feel like that. Supposing, then, I were to say to you--‘Come away from here with me to-morrow; come up to London and be my companion there’?”

“You could not do that,” she said simply. “You could not offer me so terrible and so ugly an insult. Surely you understand that then I did not know that you did not love me?”

“I see,” he murmured.

“I loved you,” she went on, her eyes lifted a little to the interlacing boughs of the trees under which they were passing, “when you came like a prince to the gate where I stood shaking with terror, and laughed at my fears. I loved you when you pointed to the end of the road and promised to take me there. I loved you in those first few moments, and just as it seemed to me then that I had loved you before I was born, so I know that I shall love you after I die. That is just the kind of wisdom which even children have. Where I was simple and ignorant was that I did not understand that love could be one-sided. I thought that love belonged to two people. Now I know very differently.”

“Myrtile----” he began.

She checked him gravely.

“To-day,” she continued, “there is more for me to say than for you, because I am rather glad that you should understand. Only you must not talk to me about Christopher. I am very sorry, but I think that he is foolish. I was a peasant child and I knew nothing. But a wise, clever man like Christopher should understand. It seems to me absurd that he should think it possible that I might love him. It is so absurd that I do not believe his love is a real thing. I think that he will soon forget.”

“What is to become of you, then, Myrtile?” Gerald demanded.

She looked up at him with a smile.

“What happens to all those others,” she asked, “who go through life as I shall go through it? They are very content. Very many pleasant things come their way. They are spared a great deal of suffering. So it will be with me. Now that we have had this talk, Gerald, I can speak to you, perhaps, a little more frankly. I watch you so closely that I see things which others might not notice. You were without actual happiness before because you did not understand what happiness was. Now you are unhappy. That is so sad.”

“Yes,” Gerald admitted, “I am unhappy.”

“There is some one for whom you care?”

He had no idea of evading the issue. He replied at once, simply and directly.

“It is Mademoiselle de Ponière, whom I met at Monte Carlo, and who used to go out with me in the car. I have met her again.”

“And yet you are not happy?”

“I am not happy,” Gerald acknowledged, “because I have not the least idea whether she cares for me or not. She is very mysterious. She has troubles which she will not let me share.”

It seemed to him that Myrtile smiled. They were out of the wood now and crossing the park.

“All that you tell me is very strange,” she confessed. “I do not pretend to understand it. One hears, Gerald, that in your way you have cared for very many women. That is rather a pity, but, if it is true, you perhaps do not know your own mind. Are you sure that you love this young lady?”

“I only know that she makes me feel and suffer as no one else in the world has ever done,” he answered a little drearily.

They were approaching the house now. Myrtile laid her fingers timidly upon his arm.

“It seems to me, Gerald,” she said, with a rather pathetic smile, “that we have changed rôles. You asked me to walk home with you that you might talk to me about Christopher, and now we have finished all that and it is your own affairs only which remain.”

“There is nothing about my affairs which even lends itself to discussion,” Gerald sighed.

“Not at present,” Myrtile assented, “but in the end there must come happiness, because where there is love there is always happiness.--May I say one word more?”

“Go ahead,” he answered.

“It is of your father. Why is he so troubled about you?”

Gerald frowned.

“I am afraid, Myrtile,” he said, “that that is a matter which I cannot altogether explain to you.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she admitted. “I must dare to say this, though, because, you see, I am with your father many hours in the day, and he is not so strong as he was and so he shows his mind more easily. Something about you is worrying him. That is not right, is it?”

Gerald was silent for a moment. A telegraph boy, who had been riding down the drive which curved through the park, seeing them, had dismounted from his bicycle and was crossing the turf towards them with an orange-coloured envelope in his hand. Gerald took it from him, tore it open, and read the few lines which it contained. Then he gave the boy a coin and dismissed him. He looked once more at the message.

“It is good news?” Myrtile enquired gravely.

“Good enough,” Gerald answered. “I have been living in a miserable state of uncertainty. Now it will all be cleared up.”

“There will be no more trouble, then?”

“I cannot say that,” he replied, “but at least there will be action. Next week will see the beginning of the elucidation. I leave for Russia on Tuesday.”