CHAPTER XV

A DAY OF CALM REFLECTION

I

At half-past eight next morning Connie Carmyle, wearing a tweed coat and skirt and neat brown brogues, came whistling downstairs, intent upon a constitutional before breakfast.

Upon the sofa in front of the hall-fire, self-consciously perusing a Sunday newspaper, sat a large man of slightly sheepish appearance. At the sight of Connie he rose guiltily to his feet. Mrs. Carmyle embraced him in a motherly fashion.

"And may I ask what you are doing here, my man?" she enquired.

"Finished things off last night after all," replied her husband; "so thought I might as well run down this morning and spend the day."

"Why?" asked Mrs. Carmyle wonderingly. She knew perfectly well; but being a woman and the possessor of an undemonstrative husband, it pleased her to spur him into making an exhibition of himself.

"Thought I should like a rest," said Mr. Carmyle gruffly. "Had a pretty tough week," he added, in a pusillanimous attempt to excite compassion.

"Is that the only reason?" persisted his heartless spouse.

"Having a wife, thought I might as well come and see her for an hour or two," conceded Carmyle grudgingly.

"You must put it better than that, darling," said Connie inexorably. "Now, be a little man! You came because--because--"

The sorely-harrassed husband, driven into a corner, turned a deep plum-colour.

"Because I love you!" he growled. "Now chuck it, Connie, for goodness' sake!"

He was rewarded by a radiant smile.

"That is much better," said Connie approvingly. "Now you shall have some breakfast. After that I have a great deal for you to do."

"What?"

"You can take us for a drive in the car."

"Us?"

"Yes--us. Me, Dicky, and his fiancee," answered Connie very distinctly.

"Righto!" replied this maddening man unconcernedly.

Connie heaved a patient little sigh, and repeated:--

"Me, Dicky, and--his fiancee."

This effort was more successful.

"Righto!" said Carmyle once more. "Freak engaged again?" he added as an afterthought.

Connie cast up her eyes in a piteous fashion, as if to imply that it is better to have a husband like this than none at all, and replied resignedly:--

"Yes. It's a long story. I wrote you a letter about it last night. Here it is in the post-basket. Read it now; while I run and break the news of your visitation to Lady Adela."

By the time that Connie returned, her taciturn but capable husband had mastered the contents of her letter--parentheses, italics, notes of exclamation, and all--and was ready to receive the orders of the day.

"Now, listen," commanded Connie swiftly. "At breakfast you will invite Dicky and Tilly to come for a run in the motor. I don't know anything about that girl, but I had a long talk with her last night when we were getting ready for bed, and she is the right sort. She seemed to like me, too. What did you say?"

"Nothing," replied the exasperating William. "Go on."

"Anyhow," continued Connie, ignoring a mysterious chuckle, "I am not going to have her pumped and bullied by Lady Adela and Sylvia before she has found her feet. Therefore we will take her and Dicky away for the day. Get your invitation off at breakfast, before Lady Adela begins organising a party for church. The young couple can have the back seat to themselves, and I will come in front with you."

"Anything you like," replied Carmyle cheerfully. He had been looking forward to an indolent morning with Connie in the smoking-room, for he really had had a hard week; but he never questioned the dispositions of the small goddess who controlled his movements. Whatever she ordained was right.

"Thank you, Bill darling! I love you very much."

Mrs. Carmyle stood upon tiptoe, and with an affectionate sigh endeavoured to lay her head upon her husband's left shoulder. Mr. Carmyle gave her no assistance. He merely removed his sovereign-purse with some ostentation from his left-hand waistcoat-pocket to his right.

II

"This is the first time that you and I have been out in a motor together, Tilly," remarked Dicky a few hours later, taking advantage of a jolt on the part of the car to annihilate a portion of the space which separated him from his beloved.

Tilly, availing herself of a margin which instinct and experience had taught her to provide for such contingencies as this, moved a corresponding number of inches farther away, and pointed out that they had enjoyed a motor-ride together only three days previously.

"On a motor-'bus," she explained.

"Motor-'bus? Not a bit. Fairy coach!" declared her highly imaginative swain.

"Fairy coaches don't as a rule carry eighteen inside and twenty-two outside, dear," replied the matter-of-fact Miss Welwyn.

"No, you are right," admitted Dicky. "Fairy coaches are invariably two-seaters. This one is n't a bad substitute, though--what?"

He lolled luxuriously, and turned to survey the profile beside him. Tilly was wearing a saxe-blue _suede_ hat, secured to her head by a filmy motor-veil--both the property of the open-handed Mrs. Carmyle, who was sitting in front driving the car under the complacent contemplation of her husband. The fur rug which Tilly shared with Dicky enveloped her to the chin: her cheeks glowed; her lips were parted in a smile of utter content; and her eyes were closed. Dicky tried to count the long lashes that swept her cheek. She was his! His--to keep, to cherish, to protect, to pamper, to spoil! Something very tremendous stirred within him--something that had never found a place in that receptive and elastic organ, his heart, before. All the dormant tenderness and chivalry of his nature seemed to heap itself up into a mighty tidal wave, topple over, and inundate his very soul. Foolish tears came into his eyes. Very reverently he reached for Tilly's hand under the rug. She surrendered it, smiling lazily, without raising her lashes. Dicky wondered what she was thinking about.

Tilly, on her part, was trying to summon up courage to tell him.

By this time the car had cleared the village of Shotley Beauchamp, filled with parties of worshippers hastening in what Connie described as "rival directions," and was spinning along the open road bound for the Surrey hills. It was a crisp and sunny morning. There was a touch of spring in the air, quickening the pulse.

"I wonder," began Dicky, whose conversation at this period, like that of all healthy young men in a similar condition, wandered round in a clearly defined and most constricted circle, "if I had not had that row with the umbrella-merchant on the top of the Piccadilly 'bus, whether you and I would ever--"

_Bang!_

Mr. Carmyle said something distressingly audible. Mrs. Carmyle applied the brakes; and the car, bumping uncomfortably, came to a standstill at the side of the road, under the lee of a pine wood.

"Was that your collar-stud at last, Tiny, old man?" enquired The Freak anxiously.

"Back tyre," replied Mr. Carmyle shortly, disencumbering himself of his rug.

They stepped out upon the muddy road and examined the off-hind wheel. The tyre was flat, but apparently whole.

"It is the valve," announced Carmyle, after unscrewing the dust-cap. "Blown himself clean out of bed. That means a fresh inner tube. And I lent the Stepney wheel to a broken-down car coming along this morning!"

"Bad luck!" said Dicky speciously, glancing up at the pine wood. "Can Tilly and I help?"

"No, better run away and play."

Dicky and Tilly, without further insincerities, obeyed at once.

"I fear you will besmirch yourself, comrade," said Dicky over his shoulder, as they departed.

"Bet you half-a-crown I don't even dirty my gloves," replied Carmyle.

"No: you'll take them off," replied the astute Richard.

"No, kid!" persisted Carmyle. "I undertake to get a new inner tube put into this tyre without laying a finger on it. Is it a bet?"

"Is Connie going to do it?" asked Dicky incredulously.

"She is and she is n't. She won't lay a finger on the tyre either, though. Will you stake your half-crown like a man?"

"I suppose there is a catch about it somewhere," said The Freak resignedly. "Still, I fancy we must humour the young people, Tilly. All right, my lad."

Mr. Carmyle turned to his wife.

"Show them, Connie," he said.

His dutiful helpmeet selected a large tyre-lever, and sitting down in the midst of the King's highway upon the tool-box, in a position which combined the maximum of discomfort with the minimum of leverage, began to pick helplessly at the rim of the wheel. Occasionally she looked up and smiled pathetically.

"Will that do, Bill dear?" she enquired.

"Yes; but try and look a bit more of an idiot."

Mrs. Carmyle complied.

"Now you're overdoing it," said her stage-manager severely. "Don't loll your tongue out like a poodle's! _That's_ better. Hallo, I believe I can hear a car already! Come on, you two--into this wood!"

Next moment Tilly, beginning dimly to comprehend, was propelled over a split-rail fence by two muscular gentlemen and bustled into the fastnesses of the pine wood. The Casabianca-like Connie remained in an attitude of appealing helplessness upon the tool-box.

The pine wood ran up the side of a hill. The trio climbed a short distance, and then turned to survey the scene below them. Round the bend of the road came a car--a bulky, heavy, opulent limousine, going thirty-five miles an hour, and carrying a cargo of fur coats and diamonds.

"Rolls-Royce. Something-in-the-City going down to lunch at Brighton," commented Dicky. "That's the wrong sort, anyhow."

"Connie will be run over," cried Tilly apprehensively.

"Not she," replied the callous Carmyle.

He was right. Connie, diagnosing the character of the approaching vehicle from afar, had already stepped round to the near side of her own, escaping a shower bath of mud and possibly a compound fracture.

"Do you always get your running repairs done this way, Tiny?" enquired Dicky of Carmyle.

"As a rule. Connie loves it. Gives her a chance of talking prettily to people and smiling upon them, and all that. She thinks her smile is her strong point."

"I should be afraid," said Tilly.

"Connie is afraid of nothing on earth," said Carmyle. "Why, she--" he flushed red and broke off, realizing that he had been guilty of the solecism of paying a public tribute to his own wife. "Here's another car coming," he said. "This looks more like what we want."

A long, lean, two-seated apparition, with a bonnet like the bow of a battleship, had swung round the bend, and was already slowing down at the spectacle of beauty in distress. It contained two goggled and recumbent figures. Presently it slid to a standstill beside the stranded car, and its occupants leaped eagerly forth.

"Metallurgique, twenty-forty," announced Dicky, with technical precision.

"Undergraduates--or subalterns," added Carmyle contentedly, beginning to fill his pipe. "That's all right. You two had better go for a little walk, while I stay here and keep an eye on the breakdown gang."

He produced from his greatcoat pocket a copy of "The Sunday Times," and having spread it on the ground at the foot of a convenient tree, sat down upon it with every appearance of cheerful anticipation, already intent upon the, to him, never-palling spectacle of his wife adding further scalps to her collection.

Dicky and Tilly, nothing loath, wandered farther along the hillside, under strict injunctions not to return for twenty minutes. It was the first time that they had found themselves alone since their arrival on the previous evening, and they had long arrears of sweet counsel to make up.

"Dicky," said Tilly, suddenly breaking one of those long silences that all lovers know, "have you ever--loved any one before me?"

Most men are asked this question at some time in their lives, and few there be that have ever answered it without some mental reservation. But The Freak merely looked surprised--almost hurt.

"Loved any one _before_? I should think I had!" he replied. "Who has n't?"

"I have not," said Tilly,

Dicky was quite prepared for this.

"I meant men--not girls," he said. "Girls are different. Not that some of them don't fall in and out of love rather easily, but they only do it as a sort of pleasant emotional exercise. The average male lover, however youthful, means business all the time. Quite right, too! It is a healthy masculine instinct for an Englishman to want to found a household of his own just as soon as he grows up. But it is this very instinct which often sends him after the wrong girl. He is full of natural affection and sentiment, and so on, and he wants some one to pour it out upon. So he picks out the first nice girl he meets, endows her in his mind with all the virtues, and tries to marry her. Usually it comes to nothing--the girl sees to that; for she is gifted by nature with a power of selection denied to men--and in any case it is hardly likely that he will meet the right girl straight off. So he goes on seeking for his mate, this child of nature, in a groping, instinctive sort of way, until at last he finds his pearl of great price. Then he sells all that he has, which being interpreted means that he straightway forgets all about every other girl he ever knew, and loves his Pearl forever and ever. Therefore, Tilly, if ever a man comes to you and tells you that you are the only girl he ever loved, trust him not. It is not likely. It is against nature."

"A girl likes to believe it, all the same, dear," answered Tilly, voicing an age-long truth.

"I don't see why she should," argued the ingenious Dicky. "It is no compliment to be loved by a man who has had no experience. Now _I_ can love and appreciate you properly, because I am able to compare you with about"--he counted upon his fingers, finally having recourse to a supplementary estimate on his waistcoat-buttons--"with about fourteen other ladies, of all ages, whom I have admired at one time and another; and can unhesitatingly place you in Class One, Division One, all by your own dear self, so far as they are concerned. Is n't that something?"

But Tilly was not quite satisfied.

"I should like to feel," she said, instinctively giving utterance to that point of view which makes a woman's love such an intensely personal and jealously exacting thing in comparison with a man's, "that you could never have been happy with any woman in the world but me. Could you, Dicky?"

Dicky pondered.

"It depends," he said, "on what you mean by happy. Our measure of happiness, it seems to me, depends entirely on what we _have_ compared with what we want. If I had never met you, I could never have missed you; and so I dare say I might have settled down happily enough--or what I considered happily enough--with some other girl. But that is impossible now. I have met you, you see. If I were to lose you"--Tilly caught her breath sharply--"no one else could ever take your place. Love like ours makes all substitutes tasteless and colourless, as they say in chemical laboratories. You have raised my standard of love so high that no one but yourself can ever attain to it. So," concluded the philosopher, with a smile which brought more happiness and reassurance into Tilly's heart than all the laborious logic-chopping in the world could have done, "though I don't know that I never _could_ have been happy with any one but you, I can truly say this, that I never _can_ be happy with any one but you. It's merely a matter of the difference between two conditional sentences, that's all."

But a girl talking with her lover is not interested in points of syntax.

"And will you go on loving me?" asked Tilly, putting a small but unerring finger upon the joint in Dicky's harness.

Dicky glanced down upon the eager, wistful face beside him, and smiled whimsically.

"Madam," he said, "your fears are groundless."

"How do you know?" enquired Madam, convinced in her heart, but anxious to be reassured.

"Because," said Dicky simply, "you love me. You have said it. Don't you see how that binds me to you? The mere fact of your love for me makes mine for you imperishable. The moment a man discovers that the woman he loves loves him in return, he is hers, body and soul. Previous to that something has held him back. Pride--reserve--caution--call it what you like--it _has_ held him back. He has not let himself go _utterly_. After all, we can only give of our best once in this life, and usually some instinct inside us makes us refuse to surrender that best, however prodigal we may have been of the inferior article, until we know that we are going to get the best in return." Dicky was talking very earnestly now. "I have been keeping my best for you all these years, little maid, though neither of us knew it. Such as it is, you have it. That is why I _know_ I can never go back on you. Besides, what man worthy of the name could let a girl down, once she had abandoned her reserve--her beautiful woman's reserve--and confessed her great secret to him? Why, I once nearly married a girl whom I could not stand at any price, just because the little idiot gave herself away one day when we were alone together."

"Why should you have married her," asked single-minded, feminine Tilly wonderingly, "if you did n't love her?"

"It seemed so mean not to," said Dicky.

Tilly nodded her head gravely.

"Yes," she said, "I think I understand." (As a matter of fact, she did not. To her, as to most women, such a quixotic piece of folly as that to which Dicky had just confessed was incomprehensible. But she desired to please her lover.) "It was like you to do it, but I hate the girl. I expect she was a designing minx. But go on, dear. Go on convincing me. I love it. Say it over and over again."

"Say what?" enquired Dicky, who was not aware that he had been saying anything unusual.

"Pearls, and things like that," replied Tilly shyly.

"Oh!" said Dicky dubiously, "that takes a bit of doing. Wait a minute!"

Tilly obediently refrained from speech while her beloved dredged his imagination for further metaphors. They were a curiously old-fashioned couple, these two. That uncanny blend of off-hand _camaraderie_ and jealously guarded independence which constitutes a modern engagement meant nothing to them. They loved one another heart and soul, and were not in the least ashamed of saying so.

Presently Dicky took up his parable.

"Hearken, O my Daughter," he began characteristically, "to the words of the Prophet. Behold, I tell you an allegory! Do you know what riveting is?"

"No, dear. Women don't understand machinery," replied Tilly resignedly, in the tones of a young mother threatened with an exposition of the mechanism of her firstborn's clockwork engine.

"Well, a rivet," pursued the Prophet, "is a metal thing like a small mushroom. It is used for binding steel plates together, and requires two people to handle it properly. First of all the rivet is heated red-hot, and then a grimy man (called the holder-on) pops the stalk of the mushroom into a hole bored through two over-lapping plates and keeps the little fellow in position with a sort of gripping-machine, while another grimy man (called the riveter) whangs his end of the stalk with a sledge-hammer. That punches the poor little rivet into the shape of a double mushroom, and the two plates are gripped together for good and all."

Tilly nodded her head. The allegory was beginning to emerge from a cloud of incorrect technical detail.

"Now it seems to me," continued Dicky, "that love is very like that. Men are the holders-on and women the riveters. I have occupied the position of holder-on several times in my life. I fancy most men do: it is their nature to experiment. (I have also had the post of riveter thrust upon me, but we need not talk about that. One tries to forget these things as soon as possible," he added, with a little wriggle.) "But the point which I want to bring out is this--a rivet can only be used _once_. It may be slipped through various plates by its holder-on in a happy-go-lucky sort of way over and over again; but once it meets the hammer fairly, good-bye to its career as a gallivanting, peripatetic little rivet! It is spread-eagled in a moment, Tilly--fixed, secured, and settled for life. And if it is the right stuff, sound metal all through, it will never wriggle or struggle or endeavour to back upon its appointed task of holding together its two steel plates. It won't _want_ to. It will endure so long as the two plates endure. Nothing can shake him, that little rivet--nothing! Poverty, sickness, misunderstanding, outside interference--nothing will have any effect. That is the allegory. The wanderings of Dicky Mainwaring are over. He has flitted about long enough, poking his inquisitive little head into places that were not intended for him; and he has come to the right place at last. One neat straight crack on his impressionable little cranium, and the deed is done! The Freak's place in life is fixed at last. Mutual love has double-ended him, and he is going to hold on now for keeps."

Dicky was silent for a moment, and then continued:--

"No one but you could have dealt that stroke, Tilly, or I should have been fixed up long ago. I could never have remained engaged to Hilda Beverley, for instance. She was a fine girl, but she did not happen to be my riveter or I her holder-on--that's all. I should have dropped out of my place at the first rattle. Lucky little rivet! Some poor beggars don't get off so cheap. They pop their impulsive little heads into the first opening, and never come out again. But Providence has been good to me, Freak though I am. I have come safe through, to the spot where the Only Possible Riveter in the World was waiting for me. Here we are together at last, settled for life. Launch the ship! _Ting-a-ling_! Full speed ahead! I have spoken! What are you trembling for, little thing?"

"I was only thinking," replied Miss Welwyn shakily, "how awful it would have been if one of the other girls had been a better riveter." Then she took a deep breath as of resolution.

"Dicky," she began, "I want to talk to you about something. I think I ought to tell you--"

But as she spoke, the figure of Mr. Carmyle, heralded by unnecessary but well-intentioned symptoms of what sounded like a deep-seated affection of the lungs, appeared among the trees, and announced:--

"Off directly, you two! Connie is just having a last farewell with her mechanics. She has collected quite a bunch of them by this time."

"They have n't taken long over the job," said Dicky, in a slightly injured tone.

Carmyle, who too had once dwelt in Arcady, smiled.

"An hour and ten minutes," he said concisely.

Dicky and Tilly said no more, but meekly uprose from the fallen tree upon which they had been sitting and accompanied their host to the road.

All signs of disaster had disappeared. The punctured back tyre stood up once more, fully inflated; the tool-box had been repacked and put away; and Connie, smiling indulgently, sat waiting at the wheel. Far away in the distance could be descried two other cars, rapidly receding from view. They contained in all five knights of the road--grotesquely attired and extremely muddy, but very perfect gentle knights after their kind--who were now endeavouring, in defiance of the laws of the land, to overtake the time lost by their recent excursion into the realms of romantic adventure; all wishing in their hearts, I dare swear, that life's highway contained a few more such halts as this.

"Connie is going to write a book one day," observed Mr. Carmyle, as they climbed into the car, "called 'Hims Who Have Helped Me.' All right behind there?"

The car set off once more.

III

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and as it was spent _a quatre_ need not be described at length.

They sped home in the gathering darkness of a frosty evening. Connie, who had relinquished the wheel to her husband, with instructions to get the car home as speedily as possible--she had not forgotten her promise to go and hear Mr. Rylands's evening sermon--now shared the back seat with Tilly; and the two ladies snuggled contentedly together under the warm rug, silently contemplating the outlines of their squires against the wintry sky.

The car swung in at the lodge gates and began to run along the crackling gravel of the drive. Presently, as they rounded a bend, the lights of the house sprang into view.

"Tea--and a big fire!" murmured Connie contentedly.

To Tilly the sight of the house suggested other thoughts. Suddenly she removed her gaze from Dicky's broad back and slipped a cold hand into Connie's.

"Will they try to take him from me?" she whispered passionately.

One of Connie Carmyle's many gifts was her ability to catch an allusion without tiresome explanations. Straightway she turned and looked deep into the appealing grey eyes beside her. Her own brown ones glowed indomitably.

"If they do, dear," she answered--"fight for him."

"I will," said Tilly, setting her teeth.

The two girls gripped hands in the darkness.