"The devil you did!" ejaculated Ned. Vaguely all this interested him, made him forget himself. "What did she say?"
Peter Ramsay got up and walked about the room. "What did she say? It is an odd thing, Blackborough, what different ideas people have about love. I used to think it was a kind of fever that would yield to strict diet, and a saline treatment. It isn't. At least something which has got mixed up in it may be so; but--now on the other hand your cousin, who is a sensible woman, mind you, seems to me somehow to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. She thinks--oh! hang it all I can't go vivisecting what she thinks--it's bad enough to do it for oneself--but because she can't at nine-and-twenty feel the same--yes! I'll say it--purely physical attraction for me that she felt for that poor sick man at nineteen, she says that it is a desecration for any one even to speak of marriage to her. I often wish the good women of the world could be made to understand how purely evanescent that sort of thing is, for how little it counts in the aggregate sum of life. Here is Helen--Mrs. Tressilian--giving it first place, while other good women relegate it to the nethermost hell; and all the while they prate about love with a big L."
"My dear Ramsay," remarked Ned, "I'll give you ten thousand a year to go about the country and preach your views--and I'll give you a thousand extra for every woman you convert to them."
"Quite safe," assented Dr. Ramsay with a growl. "I should be lynched before my first quarter's salary was due."
"Meanwhile you will stick to it--and manage?"
"Oh! I'll manage all right. I have an A1 prescription for the febrile part of the disease--I--I should like to give it to you----"
The red brown eyes looked into the blue ones. "Yes!" replied Ned coolly, "she has married the other fellow because, no doubt, love seemed to her to be the devil. You are about right, Ramsay. Women are _impayable_ in that connection. Good-bye."
He tried to amuse himself in a thousand ways that afternoon, but they all failed, so he took to business the next day, and went back to New Park in the evening and drank another bottle of champagne and smoked still more cigarettes.
The next day brought him a letter in an unknown hand. Was it a man's or a woman's, he wondered. A woman's surely, since the black-edged envelope smelt horribly of scent as he opened it.
Aura Cruttenden! The signature gave him quite a shock. The idea of her using either black-edged paper or scent revolted him, but the letter was--passable.
"Dear Ned," it ran, "I suppose I ought to call you Lord Blackborough, but I can't. I shall never forget you. You have taught me, I think, everything I know that's worth knowing. Perhaps ever so long age you and I were the same Am[oe]ba. What are we going to be in the end. That is the question. Don't--don't quarrel with us, please.--Yours,
"Aura Cruttenden."
"Don't quarrel!" That was all very well; but what else was there to do? It was impossible for him to go on drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes till he died.
Finally, he tried London and a round of the theatres and music-halls.
He amused himself immensely and was never for one instant content. He played bridge at the club, and went no trumps until a choleric old gentleman remarked that it was no wonder he had such a dislike to the Day of Judgment. Whereupon he laughed and played no more. Then he sought out Mr. Hirsch, and went gold-bugging in the city, but after dining _en petit comite_ with many Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics at every smart set restaurant in London, at every one of which Mr.
Hirsch called the waiters by their names as if they were his own servants, he gave it up in sheer disgust, and tried to feel an interest in the Grand National, even to the extent of allowing himself to bet freely with his friends. He did everything in fact that a man can do to please himself, short of buying cheap or dear kisses; and even that he might have done, being for the time quite reckless, but for the fact he was soul-weary of womanhood, her ways and works.
Finally he went back to Blackborough and felt the first really keen and natural emotion of which he had been capable for a month, when he met Ted Cruttenden by chance in the street.
"I hope your wife is quite well," he said sedately, feeling then and there a desire to throttle his successful rival. It was a most wholesome feeling, he recognised, for it sent the blood coursing through his veins once more in honest antagonism to something of which he disapproved. Ted seemed to feel this antagonism pierce through him, decorously dressed in a black business suit though he was, for he said hurriedly--"Oh! all right. Won't you come into the office for a moment. I--I should like to speak to you."
Ned, regarding himself once more from the outside, felt vaguely amused, and acquiesced.
"Of course," began Ted, for his part feeling absolutely a somewhat ill-used and thoroughly misunderstood man, "I know the whole affair must seem, as it were underhand; but--" he looked doubtfully at his companion as if uncertain how much he knew, before resolving on the whole truth as safest. "I suppose you know now, or guess, that when you came here last Aura and I were engaged. Well! it was so. Your coming and telling me you had asked her, put me in an awful hole for I had no right, on my part, to tell you--anything. The whole affair was strictly private, I hope you understand."
"I understand that you wished it to be private," remarked Ned clearly.
"It had to be, my dear fellow," replied Ted eagerly. "To begin with, we were engaged rather hurriedly in order to please her grandfather--chiefly; and I--I felt I had no right to presume on it; it might never have come to anything. It couldn't for a long time, for I wasn't in a position to marry." Here his face fell, and he threw down the pen with which he had been fiddling in sudden impatience.
"For the matter of that, I'm not in it now. These confounded interruptions have played the dickens, and we shall have to begin in a small way; for she hasn't a penny. The place is over-mortgaged and even the furniture has to be sold. In fact, if it doesn't realise a decent price, I might be let in. Where was I? Oh! yes. Then in February, just as I was in the throes of a really good thing, I was telegraphed for again. I had been down twice before, and really, only because the old man was not satisfied, that we would keep to our engagement. So----" he paused.
"Well?" remarked Ned.
"I took down a marriage license with me--it was absolutely necessary, you see, that I should get away again as soon as I could, and I thought, if the worst came to the worst, it would calm the old man to feel that we were married. So you see there was no time to give any one any notice."
"And you were married," remarked Ned again in the same clear, hard voice.
"Yes! The rector married us in the old man's room, with Martha and him as witnesses, half an hour before I started. That is really the whole story--exactly how it came about."
"And you went back, when?" asked Ned Blackborough quickly.
"I never went back. It was awfully important that I should have a free hand, and that is how it came--about the telegrams, I mean--I had purposely left no address----"
The tapping of Ned's stick on the floor, which had been going on as he sat, his elbow on his knees, listening, ceased. "Then you mean to say," he said slowly, rising as he spoke, "that when I saw--Aura--the other day--she----" Suddenly he laughed--"Good-bye, Ted; you're not a bad sort of a chap on the whole--but you have the devil's own luck! If I had only known--if I had guessed that she----" His voice rose in sudden anger, then paused. What was the good?
"Are you going to finish your sentence, Lord Blackborough?" flared up Ted in anger also.
"Yes!" replied Ned without an instant's hesitation, reverting to his usual tone, "I am going to finish it. I am going to tell you the truth--though you haven't told it to me. There is no use in your not facing it, man. Aura doesn't by right belong to you--she belongs to me. If I'd known then--when I was at Cwnfairnog, I mean--what I know now, I--I should have tried to take her away from all your cursed money-getting even then. It's different now ... if you make her happy.
And if you don't--I--I won't be such a fool again! That's fair and square and above board. So--good-bye!"
As he walked through the streets once more, he felt that this was the last straw. Why had he not made her understand herself? Why had he not carried her off then and there to Avilion? Truly, he was cursed as a fool. He ought to have known, he ought to have guessed, he ought to have understood.
So, as he wandered aimlessly through the city, looking with a lack-lustre eye upon all its hideous sights and sounds, having in his ears the silly giggles of girls as they crowded round the shop windows, having in his eyes an endless procession in those windows, of hats and garments, and flowers and frocks, and fal-lals set there by men as a bait to the only barter which is allowed to womanhood without restraint, he told himself that he would have done right if he had carried her away from contamination to that island in the southern seas, where she would have lived to rear his children and be....
Ye Gods! What should she not have been?
For an instant he caught a glimpse of reality, and then the Dream of Life was his again; but though the Dancer of the World had on all the charms of money and civilisation and culture, her dancing did not hold his eyes.
That evening he went over to the hospital and found Helen, darning away busily at something which she hastily thrust into her work-basket as he came in. Vested interests, of course!
"I am going away, Helen," he said.
"Going away," she echoed. "Why, Ned! you have only just come back. My dear! I do wish you--you would settle down."
"That was exactly what I came to say to you," he replied. "Helen! why won't you marry Ramsay? You--you are not likely to find a better fellow, or one whom--you like better. Why not marry him, instead of darning his underclothes on the sly?" He pointed to the workbasket.
"My duty as a matron," she began, flushing gloriously.
"That will be cold comfort by--and--by," he replied kindly. "Your duty as _mater_ would be more satisfying."
Helen held her breath for a moment, then it exhaled in a little childless sigh.
"That is true, Ned," she said quietly, "but when a woman knows what Love is, she cannot give herself without it. And Love comes but once to a woman; at any rate it will only come once to me."
"I wonder," said Ned reflectively, "what womanhood would be like if one were to pound down every one who possessed it in a mortar and fashioned them afresh. Well! I am off--for six months."
"Where?"
"I will say India this time," he replied cheerfully. "Then my letters can be forwarded to Algiers--but----" this he added, seeing her remonstrant face--"I will leave my address with my agents, so you can write through them if anything is wanted--but it won't be wanted. The world gets on as well without me, as I get on without the world."
He went round afterwards to the secretary's office.
"How much capital do you think they would require to run that factory on co-operative lines?" he asked.
Woods shook his head.