"Mrs. Bailey! And why did you think I wasn't?"
"That requires thought. I don't quite see, now I come to think of it, why a lady shouldn't be engaged to a party and speak about his grandma as ..."
"As I spoke of his just now? Why not, indeed? She _is_ a dowager-duchess."
"I admit it. But there are ways and ways of calling people dowager-duchesses. It struck me that your way suggested that there was something ridiculous about ... about _dowadging_."
"So there is--to me. I believe it arose from the newspaper saying, when we had a ball in London for me to come out, that the Dowager Lady Scamander had a magnificent diamond stomacher. Perhaps you don't happen to know the shape of that good lady?... Never mind. Anyhow, I am _not_ engaged to this one's grandson; and she's safe in the west wing, where the ghost never goes. We've got it all to ourselves. Go on!"
"My first idea was how to prevent Europe and Asia finding it out and frightening my family, at least until my eyes had had time to turn round. The next voice I heard was the doctor's, summoned, I suppose, by Mrs. Bailey. It was cheerful, and said that was good hearing, and now we should do. He said:--'You lie quiet, Mr. Torrens, and I'll tell you what it all was; because I daresay you don't know, and would like to.' I said yes--very much. So he told me the story in a comfortable optimist way--said it was a loss of blood from the occipital artery that had made such a wreck of me, but that a contusion of the head had been the cause of the insensibility, which had nearly stopped the action of the heart, else I might have bled to death...."
"Oh, how white you were when we found you!" Gwen exclaimed--"So terribly white! But I half think I can see how it happened. Your heart stopped pumping the blood out, because you were stunned, and that gave the artery a chance to pull itself together. That's the sort of idea Dr.
Merridew gave me, with the long words left out."
"What a very funny thing!" said Adrian thoughtfully, "to have one's life saved by being nearly killed by something else. _Similia similibus curantur._ However, all's fish that comes to one's net. Well--when Sir Coupland had told me his story, he said casually:--'What's all this Mrs.
Bailey was telling me about your finding the room so dark?' I humbugged a little over it, and said my eyesight was very dim. Whatever he thought, he said very little to me about it. Indeed, he only said that he was not surprised. A shock to the head and loss of blood might easily react on the optic nerve. It would gradually right itself with rest. I said I supposed he could try tests--lenses and games--to find out if the eyes were injured. He said he would try the lenses and games later, if it seemed necessary. For the present I had better stay quiet and not think about it. It would improve. Then my father and 'Rene came, and were jolly glad to hear my voice again. For I had only been half-conscious for days, and only less than half audible, if, indeed, I ever said anything. But I was on my guard, and my father went away home without knowing, and I don't believe 'Rene quite knows now. It was your father who spotted the thing first. Had he told you, to put you up to the hand-shaking device?"
"He never said a word. The handshaking was my own brilliant idea. When I found--what I did find out--I went away and had a good cry in mamma's room." This speech was an effort on Gwen's part to get a little nearer--ever so little--to Marcus Curtius; nearer, that is, to her metaphorical parallel of his heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her "good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases of special licence, or pass current merely under _chaperonage_? No--she was safe so far certainly.
"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a tone of real distress. "Why--why--should I make you miserable and lay you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune....
Well--I _have_ been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as merry as a grig...."
"Do grigs read diamond type?"
"_I_ may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression 'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."
"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has waned again perceptibly.
"Why--suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"
"But you weren't!"
"Lady Gwendolen, you don't understand the nature of an hypothesis"--his absurdity gets the upper hand again--"the nature of an hypothesis is that its maker is always in the right. I am, this time. If I had been nursed round at the Mackworth Clarkes', you would have known nothing about me except as a mere accident--a person in the papers--a person one inquires after...."
Gwen interrupts him with determination. "Stop, Mr. Torrens," she says, "and listen to me. If you had been struck by a bullet fired by my father's order, by his servant, on his land, it would not have mattered what house you were taken to, nor who nursed you round. I should have felt that the guilt--yes, the guilt!--the _sin_ of it was on the conscience of us all; every one of us that had had a hand, a finger, in it, directly or indirectly. How could I have borne to look your sister in the face...?"
"You wouldn't have known her! Come, Lady Gwen!"
"Very well, then, give her up. Suppose, instead, the girl you are engaged to had been a friend of mine, how could I have borne to look _her_ in the face?"
"_She's_ a hypothesis. There's no such interesting damsel--that I know of...."
"Oh, isn't there?... Well--she's a hypothesis, and I've a right to as many hypothesisses as you have."
"I can't deny it."
"Then how should I look her in the face? Answer my question, and don't prevaricate."
"What a severe--Turk you are! But I won't prevaricate. You wouldn't be called on to look the hypothesis in the face. She would have broken me off, like a sensible hypothesis that knew what was due to itself and its family...."
"Do be serious. Indeed _I_ am serious. It was in my mind all last night--such a dreadful haunting thought!--what would this girl's feelings be to me and mine? I made several girls I know stand for the part. You know how one overdoes things when one is left to oneself and the darkness?..."
"Yes--that I do! No doubt of it!" The stress of a meaning he could not help forced its way into his words, in spite of himself. Surely you need not have shown it, said an inner voice to him. He made no reply. But he did not see how.
Almost before he had time to repent she had cried out:--"Oh, there now!
See what I have done again! I did not mean it. Do forgive me!" Neither saw a way to patching up this lapse, and it was ruled out by tacit consent. Gwen resumed:--"You know, I mean, how one dreams a thousand things in a minute, and everything is as big as a house, even when it's only strong coffee. This was worse than strong coffee. There were plenty of them, these hypothesisses.... Oh yes!--we know plenty of girls you do. I could count you up a dozen...."
"--One's enough!--that means that one's the allowance, not that it's one too many...."
"Well--there were a many reproachful dream-faces, and every one of them said to me:--'See what you have made of my life that might have been so happy. See how you have con ...'" Gwen had very nearly said _condemned_, but stopped in time. She could not refer to the demands of an eyeless mate for constant help in little things, and all the irksomeness of a home.
Adrian, pretending not to hear "con," spoke at once. "But did none of these charming girls--I'm sure I should have loved heaps of them--did none of them remind you that they were hypothetical?"
"Dear Mr. Torrens, I can't tell you how good and brave you seem to me for laughing so much, and turning everything to a joke. But I _was_ in earnest."
"So was I."
"_Then_ I did not understand."
"What did you think I meant?"
"I thought you were playing fast and loose with the nonsense about the hypothesis. I did indeed."
"Well, I was serious underneath. Listen, and I'll tell you. This _fiancee_ of mine that you seem so cocksure about has no existence. I give you my honour that it is so, and that I am glad of it.... Yes--glad of it! How could I bear to think I was inflicting myself on a woman I loved, and making her life a misery to her?"
Gwen thought of beginning:--"If she loved you," and giving a little sketch of a perfect wife under the circumstances. It never saw the light, owing to a recrudescence of Marcus Curtius, who stood to win nothing by his venture--was certainly not in love with Erebus. An act of pure self-sacrifice on principle! Nothing could be farther from her thoughts, be so good as to observe, than that she _loved_ this man!
He went on uninterrupted:--"No, indeed I am heartily glad of it. It would be a terrible embarrassment at the best. I should want to let her off, and she would feel in honour bound to hold on, and really of all the things I can't abide self-sacrifice is.... Well, Lady Gwendolen, only consider the feelings of the chap on the altar! Hasn't he a right to a little unselfishness for his own personal satisfaction?" This was a sad wet blanket for Marcus Curtius.
Gwen did not believe that Adrian's disclaimer of any preoccupation of his affections was genuine. According to her theory of life--and there is much to be said for it--a full-blown Adonis, that is to say, a lovable man, refusing to love any woman on any terms, was a sort of monstrosity. The original Adonis of Art and Song was merely an _homme incompris_, according to this young lady. He hated Venus--odious woman!--and no wonder. _She_ to claim the rank of a goddess! Besides, Gwen suspected that Adrian was only prevaricating. Trothplight was one thing, official betrothal another. It was almost too poor a shuffle to accuse him of, but she was always flying at the throat of equivocation, even when she knew she might be outclassed by it. "You are playing with words, Mr. Torrens," said she. "You mean that you and this young lady are not 'engaged to be married'? Perhaps not, but that has nothing to do with the matter. I cannot feel it in my bones--as Mrs. Bailey says--that any woman you could care for would back out of it because you ... because of this dreadful accident." Her voice was irresolute in referring to it, and some wandering wave of that electricity that her finger-tips were so full of made a cross-circuit and quickened the beating of her hearer's heart. The vessel it struck in mid-ocean had no time to right itself before another followed. "Surely--if she were worth a straw--if she were worth the name of a woman at all--she would feel it her greatest happiness to make it up to you for such...." She was going to say "a privation," but she always shied off designating the calamity.
In her hurry to escape from "privation" she landed her speech in a phrase she had not taken the full measure of--"Well--perhaps I oughtn't to say that! I may be taking the young woman's name in vain. I only mean that that is what _I_ should feel in her position."
It had come as a chance speech before she saw its bearings. There was not the ghost of an _arriere pensee_ behind the simple fact that she had no choice but to judge another woman's mind by her own; a natural thought! Her first instinct was to spoil the force she had not meant it to have, by dragging the red herring of some foolish joke across the trail.
But--to think of it! Here had she been hatching such a brave scheme of making her own life, and all the devotion she somehow believed she could give, a compensation for a great wrong, and here she was now affrighted at the smell of powder! Pride stepped in, and the memory of Quintus Curtius. No--she would not say a single word to undo the effect of her heedlessness. Let the worst stand! They had left her in the place of that hypothesis whom she had herself discarded. It was no fault of hers that had involved her personally. Was she bound to back out? She bit her lip to check her own impulse to utter some cheap corrective.
Until that rather scornful disclaimer of the Duke's son, Mrs. Bailey's piece of fashionable intelligence had served--whether Adrian believed it or not--as a sort of chaperon's aegis extended over this interview. It had protected him against himself--against his impulse to break through a silence that his three weeks' memory of this girl's image had made painful. Recollect that her radiant beauty, in that setting sun-gleam, was the last thing human his eyes had rested on before the night came on him--the night that might be endless. It was not so easy, now that an imaginary _fiancee_ had been curtly swept away, to fight against a temptation he conceived himself bound in honour not to give way to. Not so easy because _something_, that he hoped was not his vanity, was telling him that this girl beside him, her very self that he had seen once, whose image was to last for ever, was at least not placing obstacles in his way. For anything that _she_ was doing to prevent it, he might drive a coach-and-six through the social code that blocks a declaration of passion to a girl under age without the consent of her parents. He was conscious of this code, and his general acceptance of it. But he was not so law-abiding but that he must needs get on the box--of the coach-and-six--and flick the leaders with his whip.
For he asked abruptly:--"How do you know that?" driving home the nail of personality to the head.
"Perhaps I am wrong," said Gwen, dropping her flag an inch. "But I was thinking so all last night. I was in a sort of fever, you see, because I felt so guilty, and it grew worse and worse...."
"You were thinking that...?"
"Well--you know--it was before I had any idea she was a hypothesis. I thought she was real because of the ring."
"My ring! Fancy!... But I'll tell you about my ring presently. Tell me what you were thinking...."