“I should like to show you my home,” she said with a sudden impulse, and did not check herself before the words were spoken. “Perhaps some day,” she continued hurriedly, “you will tell me of those three years you spent in Westminster.” And she hoped that he had not heard the first sentence of the two.
“I will make an exchange,” said Charnock. “I will exchange some day, if you will, the history of my three years for the history of your trouble.” He turned eagerly towards her, but she held up her hand.
“Please, please!” she said in a low, shaking voice, for her distress had come back upon her. She had begun, if not to forget it, at all events to dull the remembrance of it since she had come out upon the balcony. She had, in a word, sought and found a compensation in the new friendship of this man, and a relief in his very naïveté. But he had brought her anxieties back to her, as he clearly understood, for he said: “That is the second time this evening. I am sorry.”
“The second time?” said Miranda, quickly. “Why do you say that?”
“Am I wrong?” he asked. “Am I wrong in fearing that I myself have brought on you the trouble which I fancied I was to avert? I should be glad to know that I was wrong, for since I have stood here on this balcony, that fear has been growing. Your face so changed at the story I told you. At what point of it I do not know. I was not looking. Did I show you some misfortune you were unaware of, and might still be unaware of, if I had only held my tongue? In offering to shield you, did I only strike at you? I do not know, I am in the dark.” He spoke in a voice of intense remorse, pleading for a proof that his fear was groundless, and Miranda did not answer him at all. “I do not ask you to speak freely now,” he continued; “but sometime perhaps you will. You see, we shall be neighbours.”
“Neighbours!” exclaimed Miranda, and her lips parted in a smile.
“You live at Ronda, Lady Donnisthorpe tells me; my headquarters now are at Algeciras;” and he told her briefly of his business there.
“My cousin did not tell me that,” said Miranda.
Lady Donnisthorpe, in the wisdom of her heart, had, in fact, carefully concealed Charnock’s place of abode, thinking it best that Miranda should learn it from Charnock’s lips, and be pleasantly surprised thereby. That Miranda was pleasantly surprised might perhaps have been inferred by a more experienced man, from the extreme chilliness of her reply.
“Ronda is at the top,” she said, “Algeciras at the bottom, and there are a hundred miles of hillside and cork-forest between.”
“There are also,” retorted Charnock, “a hundred miles of railway.”
“Shall we go back into the room?” suggested Miranda.
“If you wish. Only there is something else I am trying to say to you,” said Charnock, and at that Miranda laughed, and laughed with a fresh bright trill of amusement. It broke suddenly and spontaneously from her lips and surprised Charnock, who was at a loss to reconcile it with the signs of her distress. He turned towards her. “What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said hastily, “nothing at all.”
“You wished to go in?”
“Not now, — not for the world.”
She was genuinely amused. Her eyes laughed at him in the starlight. Charnock was very content at the change in her, though he did not at all understand it. It made what he meant to say easier, if he could only find the means to say it. He held the means unwittingly in his hand, for he held Miranda’s glove. It was that glove which provoked her amusement. Charnock, with a pertinacity which was only equalled by his absence of mind, was trying to force his hand into Mrs. Warriner’s glove. He had already succeeded in slipping the long sleeve of it over his palm; he was now engaged in the more strenuous task of fitting his fingers into its slender fingers, as he leaned upon the balcony.
“You are laughing, no doubt, at my pertinacity, and it is true that our acquaintanceship is very slight,” said he.
“In a moment you will irretrievably destroy it,” said she, looking at the glove.
“I hope you don’t mean that,” he answered sadly, as he smoothed the finger-tip of the forefinger down upon his own, and at once proceeded to the other fingers. The little finger in particular needed a deal of strenuous coaxing, and caused him to break up his words with intervals of physical effort. “Because — as I say — we shall be neighbours — there!” — The exclamation “there” meant that he was satisfied with the third finger.— “A hundred miles of hill-side — in a foreign country — on a map a thumb will cover it.”
“Will it cover a thumb, though?” asked Miranda, who took a feminine interest in the durability of her glove. She leaned forward in a delighted suspense, as Charnock proceeded to answer her question by experiment.
“There’s the railway too,” said he, as he struggled with the thumb of the glove, “and as I say, a foreign country. Very likely, we shall be nearer neighbours, though you are at Ronda and I am at Algeciras, than if you lived in this house and I at the house next door. Because after all there’s one advantage in trouble of any kind. Trouble is the short foot-path to friendship, don’t you think? Like that line of lamps across the Park.”
Miranda forgot the glove. She was touched by the deep sincerity of his voice, by the modesty of his manner. She rose from her chair and stood by his side at the balustrade. “Yes,” she answered, looking at the circling lights on the outer rim of the Park. “I think that is true. It spares one the long carriage-road of ceremonial acquaintanceship. But,” she said thoughtfully, “I do not know whether after all I shall soon return to Ronda.”
She heard a little sound of something tearing, and there was Charnock contemplating in amazement upon his left hand a white kid glove of which the kid was ripped across the palm. He felt in his pocket with his right hand and drew out both of his own gloves, which he had taken off while he was talking in the alcove. Then he looked at Miranda and his amazement became remorse.
“It’s yours!” he said. “Of course, I picked it up. I had forgotten even that I was holding it. I had no notion that I was putting it on.”
“I gave you fair warning,” said Miranda, with a frank laugh, “but you would not pay any attention.”
Charnock looked at her with absolute incredulity. “You mean to say that you don’t mind? You are wonderful!”
“It seems almost too late to mind,” said she, looking at the tattered glove.
“Or to mend,” said he, ruefully, drawing it off with extreme care, and as a new thought struck him. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “suppose it had belonged to anyone else, the dowager in the window, for instance.” He dangled the glove in the air. “Now that’s a lesson!”
“Perhaps it’s a parable,” said Miranda, as she took the glove from him.
Charnock saw that she had grown quite serious. “If so,” said he, “I cannot expound it.”
“Shall I?” The smile had faded from her lips, her eyes shone upon his, with no longer a sparkle of merriment, but very still, very grave.
“Yes.”
“Well, then,” she said slowly, “shall I say that no man can offer a woman his friendship or help without doing her a hurt in some other way?”
His eyes as steadily answered back to hers. “Do you believe that?” he said. He spoke quite simply without raising his voice in any way, but none the less Mrs. Warriner was certain that she had but to say “yes,” and there would be an end, now and forever, of his questions, of his help, of his friendship, of everything between them beyond the merest acquaintanceship. Perhaps some day they might cross the harbour together in the same ferry from Algeciras to Gibraltar, and bow and exchange a careless word, but that would be all — and only that until his work was finished there.
“Do you believe that?”
She was half tempted to say “yes”; but she had an instinct, a premonition, that whatever answer she made would stretch out to unknown and incalculable consequences. She seemed to herself to be drawing the lots which one way or another would decide and limit all her ye
ars to come. Upon the tiny “yes” or “no” between which she had to make her choice, her whole life was destined to pivot. Accordingly, she made up her mind to say neither, but to turn the matter into a jest. “Here’s the proof,” said she, as lightly as she could, and she flourished the glove.
But the man steadily held her to his question, with his eyes, with his voice, with his very attitude. “Do you believe that?” he repeated.
“I don’t know whether I believe it,” she murmured resentfully. “I don’t see why I should be asked to mean what I say, or whether I mean what I say.... But it might be so, I think.... I don’t know.... I don’t know.”
To her relief Charnock moved. If he had stood like that, demanding an answer with every line of his body, for another instant, she knew she would have been compelled to answer one way or another; and she felt certain, too, that whatever answer she gave it would have been the one she would have wished afterwards to take back. “Now if you are satisfied,” she added with a touch of petulance, “we will go in.”
He moved aside for her to pass, but before she had time to step forward, he moved back again and barred the way. “No, please,” he said quickly, and his voice thrilled as though he had hit upon an inspiration.
“Lady Donnisthorpe told me you were rather unconventional,” she remarked with a sigh, which was only half of it a jest; and she drew back as though she did not wish to hear what he had to say, as though she almost feared to hear it.
But Charnock barely even remarked her reluctance. “That glove,” he said, and pointed to it. Miranda imagined that he was reaching out a hand for it.
“I have heaps of pairs,” she exclaimed, whipping it behind her back; “there is no need to trouble about it at all.”
“I do not ask for it; I had no thought of that. On the contrary, I would ask you to keep it if you will. There is something else which I was trying to say, if you remember.”
“Dear, dear!” said Miranda, ruefully, “I could wish after all that you had trodden on my toes.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Charnock, and instantly he drew aside. He left the way clear for her. She passed him, and went towards the window, from which the lights and the music streamed out into the night. Had he followed, she would have stepped into the room, amongst the dancers; she would have been claimed by a partner, and she would have seen no more of Charnock, and the only consequences of this interview upon the balcony would have been a memory in her thoughts, a curiosity in her speculations.
But Charnock did not follow her. He remained where she left him, and her feet loitered more with every step she took. At the edge of the window she stopped. For the second time that evening she became aware that one way or other she must do the irrevocable thing. It was a mere step to make across the sill of the window, from the stone of the balcony to the parquet of the ball-room floor, — a thing insignificant in itself and in its consequences most momentous. She stood for a second undecided. The sight of her partner looking about the room decided her. She came back to where Charnock stood in a soldierly rigidity.
“You might have come half-way to meet me,” she said in a whimsical complaint, and then very gently: “I will hear what you wish to say, if you will still say it.”
“What I mean is this,” he replied; “it is what I was trying to say. The hardest thing, if one ever wants help, is — don’t you think? — the asking for it. I could not say that to you until I had hit upon a means by which the asking, should it ever be necessary, might be dispensed with. And it seemed to me that there was something providential in my tearing that glove; for that torn glove can be the means, if ever you see fit to use it. You live at Ronda; for the next year I am to be found at Algeciras; you will only have to send that torn glove to me in an envelope. I shall know without a word from you; and when I answer it by coming up to you at Ronda, it will be understood by both of us, again without a word, why I have come. I shall not need to speak at all; you will only need to say the precise particular thing which needs to be done.”
Miranda stood with her eyelids closed, and her ungloved hand pressed over her heart. The blood darkened her cheeks. Charnock saw her whole face soften and sweeten. “I understand,” she said in a low voice. “I might appeal and be spared the humiliation of appealing, like the face in your mirror.”
“I believe,” said he, “that my mirror sent me a message on that night. I have tried to deliver it.”
Miranda slowly raised her eyes and they glistened with something other than the starlight. “Thank you,” she said; “for the delicacy of the thought I am most grateful. What woman would not be? But I do not think that I shall ever send you the glove: not because I would not be glad to owe gratitude to you, but just for the same reason which has kept me from telling you anything of my troubles. Such as they are I must fight them through by myself.”
This time she passed over the sill into the ballroom; but she was holding the glove tight against her breast, and she had a feeling that Charnock very surely knew that at some time she would send it to him.
CHAPTER VI
WHILE CHARNOCK BUILDS CASTLES IN SPAIN, MIRANDA RETURNS THERE
THE ANXIOUS DOWAGER, who was preparing to depart with her daughter, had just risen from her seat by the window as Miranda stepped over the sill into the ball-room. She sat down again, however, for she had a word or two to say concerning Miranda’s appearance.
“Muriel,” she observed, “take a good look at that woman, and remember that if ever you sit out with one man for half-an-hour on a cool balcony you can make no greater mistake than to return with a flushed face.”
“Thank you, mother,” said Muriel, who was growing restive under this instructional use of an evening party. “I will take the first opportunity of practising your advice.”
At this moment Charnock stepped over the sill. He stepped up to Mrs. Warriner’s side and spoke to her. Mrs. Warriner stopped within a couple of yards of the dowager and gave her hand, and with her hand her eyes, to her companion.
“Muriel, look!” said the censorious one. “How vulgar!”
“Shall I listen too?” asked Muriel, innocently.
“Do, my child, do!” said the dowager, who was impervious to sarcasm.
What was said, however, did not reach the dowager’s ears. It was, indeed, no more than an interchange of “good-nights,” but the dowager bridled, perhaps out of disappointment that she had not heard.
“An intriguing woman I have no doubt,” said she, as through her glasses she followed Miranda’s retreat.
“Surely she has too much dignity,” objected the daughter.
“Dignity, indeed! My child, when you know more of the world, you will understand that the one astonishing thing about such women is not their capacity for playing tricks but their incredible power of retaining their self-respect while they are playing them. Now we will go.”
The dowager’s voice was a high one. It carried her words clearly to Charnock, who had not as yet moved. He laughed at them then with entire incredulity, but he retained them unwittingly in his memory. The next moment the dowager swept past him. The daughter Muriel followed, and as she passed Charnock she looked at him with an inquisitive friendliness. But her eyes happened to meet his, and with a spontaneous fellow-feeling the girl and the man smiled to each other and at the dowager, before they realised that they were totally unacquainted.
Lady Donnisthorpe was lying in wait for Charnock. She asked him to take her to the buffet. Charnock secured for her a chair and an ice, and stood by her side, conversational but incommunicative. She was consequently compelled herself to broach the subject which was at that moment nearest to her heart.
“How did you get on with my cousin?” she asked.
Charnock smiled foolishly at nothing.
“Oh, say something!” cried Lady Donnisthorpe, and tapped with her spoon upon the glass plate.
“Tell me about her,” said Charnock, drawing up another chair.
Lady Donnisthorpe lowered her v
oice and said with great pathos: “She is most unhappy.”
Charnock gravely nodded his head. “Why?”
Lady Donnisthorpe settled herself comfortably with the full intention of wringing Charnock’s heart if by any means she could.
“Miranda comes of an old Catholic Suffolk family. She was eighteen when she married, and that’s six years ago. No, six years and a half. Ralph Warriner was a Lieutenant in the Artillery, and made her acquaintance when he was staying in the neighbourhood of the Pollards, that’s Miranda’s house in Suffolk. Ralph listened to Allan Bedlow’s antediluvian stories. Allan was Miranda’s father, her mother died long ago. Ralph captured the father; finally he captured the daughter. Ralph, you see, had many graces but no qualities; he was a bad stone in a handsome setting and Miranda was no expert. How could she be? She lived at Glenham with only her father and a discontented relation, called Jane Holt, for her companions. Consequently she married Ralph Warriner, who got his step the day after the marriage, and the pair went immediately to Gibraltar. Ralph had overestimated Miranda’s fortune, and it came out that he was already handsomely dipped; so that their married life began with more than the usual disadvantages. It lasted for three years, and for that time only because of Miranda’s patience and endurance. She is very silent about those three years, but we know enough,” and Lady Donnisthorpe was for a moment carried away. “It must have been intolerable,” she exclaimed. “Ralph Warriner never had cared a snap of his fingers for her. His tastes were despicable, his disposition utterly mean. Cards were in his blood; I verily believe that his heart was an ace of spades. Add to that that he was naturally cantankerous and jealous. To his brother officers he was civil for he owed them money, but he made up for his civility by becoming a bully once he had closed his own front door.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 298