CHAPTER XVI

John decided to walk into Freshwater, and then take the train to Newport. As he made his way along the road from Heatherpoint, carrying a small handbag, a red bicycle came towards him.

"Are you going to the fort?" he asked the telegraph boy.

"Yes, sir."

"Anything for Treves?"

The boy nodded.

"Lieutenant Treves, sir."

A minute later John had torn open an envelope containing a telegram, which ran:

_Come to me at the Gordon Hotel, Newport. Shall be there this evening_. ELAINE.

Elaine's wire came to him as an utter surprise, a surprise that was tinctured with pleasure. He had never forgotten her since their first, and only meeting. He had indeed thought of her a hundred times, recalling her as she stood in the little room in Camden Town. Without doubt she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

During the past weeks every moment of his time had been occupied, and there had been no possibility of carrying out his promise to visit her.

As he walked he drew out her telegram and read it carefully through, possibly for the sixth time. The wording brought to him a measure of comfort; he felt, somehow, that she was not in so distressed a state of mind as when he had received her former wire to Bernard Treves.

"I shall see her within an hour," thought John, as he stepped into a train at Freshwater. But as the train drew nearer to Newport his high spirits evaporated; he began to argue that Elaine Treves was outside his sphere of work. Dacent Smith had impressed upon him the intense seriousness of the German menace on the South Coast; no private considerations, John told himself, held precedence of the duty that lay before him. Elaine Treves was a victim of the innocent deception he had been obliged to practise. But it was not his fault that she was an extremely beautiful woman, and that she believed him to be her husband.

At the Gordon Hotel, a small quiet, specklessly clean building, John entered the hall, and found Elaine herself descending the stairs. For a moment the girl did not notice him, and John was free to observe the daintiness of her costume, the slender dignity of her figure, and the quite astonishing beauty of her grey, long-lashed eyes. The note of pathos that had been apparent when he first met her was now not so marked. She struck him as serious, but not depressed.

Elaine had descended the stairs to the vestibule before her eyes met his.

"Oh, Bernard," she exclaimed, and instantly took his hand in her gloved fingers. "But you can't have come in answer to my wire?" she went on.

"No," said John; "I came on other business."

"You are not angry with me?"

"No; why should I be angry?" asked John.

"Because I wired to you," said Elaine. "Let us go upstairs, Bernard. The sitting-room's empty; we can talk there."

She led him up to a little, parlour-like apartment, with a gay carpet, and a circular table in the middle of the room. Here she closed the door and stood with her back to it, looking up into John's face. Her eyes searched his closely. Her splendid beauty, the wistful expression of her face, a certain shy girlishness, all appealed to John's feelings. He found it difficult to sustain the searching gaze lifted to his.

Suddenly Elaine drew in a deep breath.

"Bernard," she whispered, "you are different."

John turned away.

"Yes," he answered, quietly, "I suppose I am a little different."

"Ever since the last time I saw you I have felt it," went on Elaine. "I have thought much of our last meeting," she added.

"So have I," John answered lamely, not knowing exactly how to handle the situation. They were seated now on opposite sides of the hearth, and Elaine was taking the hatpins out of her hat with pretty feminine gestures that held John's attention.

"I was only going a lonely walk," she explained, "when I met you, but I won't go now; we'll have tea here together. You will notice," she went on, placing her hat on her knee and piercing it with her long hatpins, "that I have not scolded you for failing to write to me."

"I am sorry," said John, "but I have been tremendously occupied."

"I guessed," said Elaine, "that you were at home with your father. I am so glad of that, Bernard; I used to feel," she went on, hesitatingly, "that you were not treating him well, and that his indignation against you was--was--" she hesitated a moment--"well--justified."

John had been observing her closely.

"Why did you wire for me, Elaine?" he said, using her name for the first time.

Elaine looked at him, and then away. The colour rose to her cheeks, a delicate colour that enhanced her beauty.

"I don't know," she said. "I got a little frightened, I think. You see, your friend, Captain Cherriton, began to call on me rather regularly."

John pricked up his ears.

"Did he cross-examine you about me?"

Elaine shook her head.

"He scarcely mentioned you."

"Oh, I see," said John, suddenly enlightened; "he came to force his unpleasant attentions upon you. Is that it?"

Elaine was silent a moment. She was thinking how well John carried himself. The husband she had known, neurotic and nerveless and irritable, now appeared before her clear-eyed, calm and more manly than she had ever believed him to be. She felt herself drawn to him, as she had felt herself attracted on that last meeting in London. Her nature was quick and ready to forgive.

"I had to forbid him the house in the end, Bernard."

John sat suddenly erect.

"Was he impudent to you?"

The sudden lowering of his brows and tension of his figure caught Elaine's interest.

"Then you do mind, Bernard?" she asked quietly.

"Of course I mind, when you are insulted," he returned. "Or, rather, I ought to mind."

For, like a blow, the thought suddenly struck him that he himself was treating her with gross injustice. It was one thing to deceive, in a good cause, Colonel Treves; it was another thing to deceive this young and beautiful girl, who was another man's wife. And he, John Manton, was standing in that other man's shoes.

John's situation at that moment was as delicate as any situation in which he had yet found himself. It was an easy matter to confront Manwitz and Cherriton, and even Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, in the character of Bernard Treves. It was not so easy to present himself in that character before Bernard Treves's wife. The thought that had occurred to him at their first meeting came again into his mind; at any moment he might make a false step. An unlucky turn of phrase, a lack of knowledge of some incident in their mutual past, might instantly betray him. For Elaine Treves, despite her striking beauty and her intense femininity, was quite keenly alive and intelligent.

They took tea in the hotel, and after the meal John suggested a walk in the town. Elaine readily assented, and together they explored the quaint side streets of Newport. If matters had been different, if John had accompanied her in his own character, and had not had to act a part that was extraordinarily difficult, he would have been in the highest of spirits.

Already he had remarked upon Elaine's air of distinction. She knew how to dress, how to put on her hat, how to make herself in all respects a delightful picture of girlish attraction. John knew nothing of feminine economics, or he would have been aware that her fashionably smart costume and that pretty hat she wore had cost almost nothing at all, and had been mostly the work of her own hands.

During the walk they stopped and looked into a quaint curiosity shop. John admired a set of old Chippendale chairs and a pair of inlaid duelling pistols. He and Elaine were standing close together as he spoke, and he felt her slender, gloved hand laid delicately on his arm.

"Bernard!"

"What is it?" asked John.

She was looking up into his face, a pleased expression in her fine grey eyes.

"Your taste seems to have changed utterly."

"Oh, I don't know," said John. "I--I--perhaps my taste has matured----"

"You used to hate all old things."

John was looking down into her face, that appeared to him now as the most beautiful in the world. He made no answer to her remark, and Elaine went on:

"You look at things so differently, Bernard."

"In what way?" John asked.

"I don't know," answered she. "I have a sort of queer feeling, Bernard, that you are yourself, and yet there is something that has occurred to make you different."

John felt that the discussion was drifting in an awkward direction.

"Do you know what I think?" he remarked.

"What do you think?" asked Elaine, as they walked together.

"I think I ought to do something to make up for all the bad times--er--I have given you in the past."

She was silent, walking along gazing before her.

"They were bad times, some of them, Bernard," she returned, quietly. She moved a little nearer to him as they walked. "But I have always felt," she went on, "that it was not really you. I feel that--that the unfortunate habit you had contracted, the--the----"

"I understand," John intervened.

"I believe now," went on Elaine, "it was not really you. You were not responsible, and I always hoped that some time, when you had conquered yourself, you would become different."

She paused a moment, and John felt her arm slip through his. It was strange, but his pulse-beat quickened at this quiet manifestation of her growing feeling towards him. He felt that, somehow or other, she was being drawn towards him, that she was, as it were, shielding herself under his protection. And yet, all the time, the situation was an impossible one. He had no right to permit advances of this sort; the deception he was practising upon her was utterly and completely cruel. What would have happened, he asked himself, if he had suddenly faced her and had said: "I am not your husband, I am not Bernard Treves--but John Manton? The man you believe me to be--your husband--is a drug-sodden and hysterical degenerate, a soldier who has been guilty of treachery to his country."

His thoughts switched back to the necessity of turning the conversation. He could feel the warmth of her arm resting upon his own.

"Let us talk of cheerful things," he said. "For instance, that is a very pretty hat you have on."

"Do you like it? I made it myself."

"Yes, I like it," responded John, appearing to look at it with the critical eye of a husband. "Of course," he said, "it is quite easy for a hat to look well where you are concerned."

Elaine was frankly pleased.

"Why are you flattering me, Bernard?"

"That wasn't flattery. If I set out to flatter you, I should talk in quite a different way to that."

"Do you know," she went on quickly, "when I met you in the hotel my heart was beating terribly. I was afraid you might be angry!"

"How could I be angry?"

"I don't know," she said; "but sometimes, Bernard, you used to be so dreadfully angry at the things I did."

Somehow the recollection of these things appeared to sweep over her, for she drew her hand away from John's arm.

"I thought we were going to talk of cheerful things," John reminded her. He began to draw her attention to the quaintness of the streets, and managed, until their return to the hotel, to keep her mind fully occupied with trivialities.

When they reached the little sitting-room at the hotel, he rang the bell and ordered dinner to be prepared for two at seven o'clock.

"May we have it here in the sitting-room?" he asked the waiter.

"Certainly, sir," answered the man.

Elaine, whose air of constraint had quite vanished again, went to her room, took off her hat, and put on an afternoon blouse. When she returned to the sitting-room John noticed her little attempt to dress herself for the evening.

"I thought you'd like to see me in something smarter for dinner," she said. "Do you like it, Bernard?"

"It could not be better," said John. Inwardly he was saying: "I like everything about you; I like your fine, dark hair; I like your frank, beautiful eyes, and your honesty and your simplicity, and the fact that you are a girl and yet a woman. What I do dislike, however, is the fact that you have a waster of a husband, and that I have no right to be here this minute standing in that waster's shoes."

They sat down together at the round table in the middle of the hotel' parlour. The waiter, a gloomy individual, in tired-looking dress clothes and in a white shirt that should have been washed a week earlier, lit four pink-shaded candles, served the soup, and went away. Soup was followed by fish and an excellent entree. John, looking over the top of the pink-shaded candles, saw a brightness in Elaine's eyes. He had been talking gaily keeping the conversation away from anything personal, and telling her anecdotes that made her laugh. And all the time, although he was not aware of the fact, he was drawing her towards him, fanning the flame of love that the real Bernard Treves had never kindled. She was experiencing new feelings towards this man whom she believed to be her husband. The shifty look in his eyes that she had disliked in the past had vanished. The Bernard Treves who sat before her looked frankly and keenly into her face. He was not in the least intimate; he was, indeed, somewhat aloof, but this very quality of aloofness puzzled and attracted her.

By the time dinner was cleared away and the cloth removed, Elaine was completely at her ease. Her old fear of offending her husband had totally vanished. She could not understand her own feelings and began to take herself to task for having been hard with him in the past. When Bernard Treves had persisted in his habit of heavy drinking and drug-taking, she had been obliged to make a stand. She had done everything she could to win him to better ways. But when to these habits he had added violence and other cruelties towards herself, she had informed him that until he made some effort to control himself she could not live with him as his wife. It was characteristic of her, as it is sometimes characteristic of gentle people, that firmness lay beneath an unaggressive exterior. She had kept her word. But to-night, for the first time, she began to doubt the justice of what she had done. She told herself that she had been hard on Bernard Treves, that she ought to have clung to him, however low he sank.