Part 11

He had wanted, savagely, to get away from Turner just then, but when he was upstairs in his bedroom he was oppressed by a sense of loneliness. There was not a single human being in that house in whom he could confide. He had, for instance, to write to Somers; he had to say that there was no chance of his returning to Peckham, and although he had given his promise and had really no option, he would have liked to talk it over with some one before making an irrevocable decision. Had not Turner been right after all? If Elizabeth was willing to marry him, would not her companionship alleviate the occasional tediousness and loneliness of life at Hartling? If they were married they might become friends. It was impossible to be on terms of real confidence with a girl of that sort until you were married to her. She was always too conscious of her sex and doubtful about your intentions.

Now that he came to think of it, she had certainly looked very tempting in that pink frock. She was one of the prettiest girls he had ever known--though she might run to flesh in a few years' time.

He got up from the table at which he had been sitting before a still virgin sheet of Hartling note-paper, and began to walk up and down the room. How familiar, even commonplace, that room had become to him, he reflected. A few weeks ago it had been a delicious enticement, a thing ardently desired. But he would have missed it horribly if he had had to go back to Peckham. Would his marriage with Elizabeth produce a like development of sensation, beginning with enticements and ardent luxuries that would gradually become familiar, a matter of habit? He was not in love with her, but he might be when he knew her better. At present he knew absolutely nothing about her inner life. They had never talked about anything but games for more than a minute at a time....

One thing was certain, he must write that letter and announce his decision. No other had been possible. Apart from his promise to Mr Kenyon, no sane man would hesitate a moment between the alternatives of Hartling and Peckham. He would ask Somers to recommend him some modern works on surgery. He would not allow himself to rust, although it was the practical experience that was most useful. Still, he would get that in hospital--later. No one could say how long he would have to wait, but Fergusson had been talking through his hat when he had said that the old man would probably outlive him. Fergusson was good for at least another ten or fifteen years, probably more; and people did not live to over a hundred. Give the old man five years at the outside. He would probably collapse quite suddenly at the end.

But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the old man left him, Arthur, nothing after all? No! he would not consider that. It was disloyal. He had had what amounted to a promise from him, and in common justice some compensation would have to be made for taking the best years of his life. The very fact that he was getting no salary was a guarantee--an absolute guarantee. Old Kenyon might have various eccentricities, they were only to be expected at his age, but he was a good sort, and if anything a shade too impartial in his administration of justice.

And then, what about the idea of marrying Elizabeth if she would have him? He walked over to the window and leaned out. It was raining again, a light, steady rain. It looked as if they might be in for a lot of rain. Getting engaged to and marrying Elizabeth would be something to do, an excitement that would be a pleasant change from golf, billiards, croquet, and tennis. Should he go down now and try his luck? She had looked rather ripping in that pink frock. He would be able to put more ardour into his proposal when she was dressed like that. And, unless she had changed since dinner, she was in just the right mood.

Still leaning out of the window, he began to picture the proposal. He saw himself alone with Elizabeth somewhere--he might make some excuse to take her into the library--and then, beginning to overcome her levity and caprice by his earnestness--he would say that he had been in love with her from the first, but that he had been afraid to tell her--no prospects--that sort of thing. He imagined her becoming suddenly serious, reciprocating his seriousness, confessing that she, too, had always--liked him. They would be quite close together when she admitted that, and he would put his arms round her waist or over her shoulders--she had lovely shoulders--and kiss her....

He came back into the room at that point of his dream and began to walk impatiently up and down. It was very queer, he couldn't in any way account for it; but he did not in the least want to kiss Elizabeth. He had just done the thing in imagination, very vividly and realistically, and it had not stirred him in the least degree. On the contrary, it had produced a sense of being mean and contemptible. He had often kissed girls in the past, and had always liked doing it. Did he feel like that now because Elizabeth was in a different class of life, or because that kiss would be the seal of his engagement to her? He conjured up the image of her as he had seen her that night at dinner, held it before him and studied it. No, the whole truth of the matter was that he did not want to kiss her, and that was the end of it. She was not, for some reason or other, his sort.

He would now write his letter to Somers, and then go to bed.

To-morrow he might make an opportunity to have that talk with Eleanor. He would like her to understand his reasons for staying on at Hartling. She ought to know that, as he had just written to Somers, he meant to go in for a serious course of study....

He could not conjure up the image of Eleanor at will, for some reason, but sometimes it came unexpectedly with amazing vividness when he was not thinking of her--some such picture of her as her swift glance down at him in the hall when she had been going upstairs that evening.

X

The arrangements for breakfast at Hartling were in keeping with Arthur's early estimate of the place as a first-class hotel. The members of the family came down when they chose, and between eight and ten o'clock there were rarely more than two people in the breakfast-room at the same time. Miss Kenyon and Hubert came first. Hubert had a habit of getting up at six in the summer, and Miss Kenyon was a precisian. Arthur succeeded them between half-past eight and nine and sometimes had his aunt for a companion. The other four straggled in uncertainly--Joe Kenyon or his sister was always the last--and occasionally their meals overlapped. So much Arthur knew from experience, and as he had never seen Eleanor in the morning, he had inferred that she probably breakfasted with her grandfather upstairs.

He was greatly surprised, therefore, to find her at the table when he entered the room at half-past eight the next morning, surprised and for a minute or two distinctly embarrassed. He was never now in the mood for conversation so early in the day.

Until he had come to Hartling he had always been fresh and eager in the morning, but the Kenyons were taciturn and inclined to be irritable at that time, and by degrees their example had influenced him. He presumed that it was their example, but he was not sure whether or not he could attribute to the same source the sense of dissatisfaction with himself that commonly haunted him now when he first woke; dissatisfaction and a strange feeling of staleness and of disinclination to begin his easy, amusing day.

He addressed her as he might have addressed a casual acquaintance in a hotel.

"Don't often see you down here in the morning," he remarked vapidly, as he rang the bell.

"I've been given a holiday to-day," she said, without looking up. "And I was to tell you that you needn't go up this morning. My grandfather says he's feeling a little tired."

"He had rather an exciting day," Arthur agreed; investigated the cold dishes on the sideboard, and then crossed the room and sat down opposite her.

Eleanor went on quietly with her breakfast. She seemed prepared, he thought, to sit there in silence for the rest of the meal, while he on his part could think of no reasonably intelligent conversation. After the interval provided by the entrance of the butler, however, an opening presented itself to him.

"What are you going to do with your holiday?" he asked. "It'll be rather too wet for tennis, won't it?"

"I'm going for a long walk into Sussex," she said.

His first thought was that he would now find no opportunity for a quiet talk alone with her that day.

"All alone?" he asked.

"I long to be alone, sometimes," she murmured.

"It seems to me that you spend most of your time alone," he said. "We don't see much of you." She looked up at him with an expression that seemed to indicate both surprise and disappointment. "One can never be alone in the house," she said.

He did not understand. "Are you always with your grandfather?" he asked.

She shook her head and looked down again at her plate, as she said, "I meant that I couldn't think my own thoughts here."

"And what do you think about when you're out all by yourself in Sussex?" he inquired. He felt that his tone was not right, that it held a suggestion of the jocular; but he felt shy and ill at ease, afraid of being too serious.

"Just my own thoughts," she said quietly.

He wanted to say something rather profound to show that he understood and sympathised, but every sentence he tried over in his mind appeared trivial and banal. He kept his head down as he muttered finally. "I've often wondered what you think about things."

She made no reply to that, and he was afraid to look at her. His speech had sounded rather surly, he thought, and with the idea of amending it, he continued, "I mean that every one seems to take things for granted here, except you."

"What sort of things?" she asked in a low voice.

"Oh, well! speculations about life in general," he tried.

"Yes, I don't think any of us are much given to that sort of thing," she replied.

There had been some effect of a smile in her tone as she spoke, and he looked up and saw that she was indeed smiling, if a trifle ruefully.

"Not even you?" he asked.

She disregarded the implied flattery that distinguished her from all the other members of the family. "Have you done much speculating about life in general since _you've_ been here?" she returned.

He had hardly begun his breakfast yet, but he laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. "I wish you would let me come with you to-day," he said. "There are a heap of things I want to talk to you about. I know you don't like me, but it would be a real kindness if you would let me talk to you a little sometimes. There's simply no one here I can explain things to."

"Why me?" she replied.

"You're so different from all the others," he said.

"And are you?" she asked.

"Different from the others?" he repeated, staggered by the suggestion that he could be thought to resemble, in any particular, the other members of the Hartling circle.

"Yes," she prompted him quietly.

He stared at her frowning. "Am I the least like them?" he inquired with a faint trepidation in his voice.

"Not yet, perhaps; but you will be," she said.

"But they aren't like each other," he remonstrated. "Which of them shall I be like if I stay long enough, Uncle Joe, or Mr Turner, or Hubert ...?"

"Aren't they all rather alike in one way?" she asked.

He saw at once that they were; that there was some characteristic common to every one of them, even Miss Kenyon. Seen as individuals they were as different from each other as are the ears of wheat in a cornfield, but they all bowed the same way to the prevailing wind. In their attitude towards the head of the house they could all be relied upon to present the same face.

"But you've been here fourteen years," he said, "and you're still different. Or do you think it takes longer than that to get assimilated?"

"I'm not different," she replied. "Or I shouldn't be here still."

"Of course, I don't know you," he said. "I've hardly seen you since the first three or four days I was here. But--well--I can't agree with you about that."

She just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.

"You haven't said whether you will let me come with you on your walk," he began again, after a short pause.

"I would sooner you didn't," she told him. "It can't do any good. There can be nothing new that you want to ask my advice about. I said all I had to say to you about that five weeks ago, and you took no notice. I can only repeat what I said then."

"But I can't go now," he protested. "I've given my promise. I made a sort of bargain in fact."

She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't keep it," she said.

"That's absurd," he remonstrated, getting to his feet. "Of course I must keep my promise in any circumstances."

"I suppose you do really believe that?" she asked, looking up at him. "Would you keep it just the same, for instance, if you knew for certain that it meant staying on here for ten years and getting nothing, absolutely nothing, at the end of it? Would you, honestly? Or don't you think you'd ask to be let off?"

"I might ask to be let off," he admitted, after a few seconds' thought.

"Then you'll only be keeping your promise or bargain or whatever it is because you want to stay--or because you've got to," she said.

"Perhaps," he agreed. "But I've never said that I _didn't_ want to stay. I do."

She sighed. "Precisely, and now we're back again to what I said just now. Whatever is the good of talking to _me_ about it?"

"We might talk about other things," he suggested. "I should very much like to get away, too, for a few hours."

She hid her face in her hands, leaning her elbows on the table, and he waited patiently for her answer.

"Why don't you finish your breakfast?" she asked, when she looked up after what seemed to him a long interval of silence.

"I have. I don't want anything more," he said.

She got up then, and he thought she was going to leave him without deigning to take any further notice of his request, but when she was half-way across the room, she looked back and said, "Can you be ready in ten minutes?"

He started forward with the eagerness of a dog beckoned by its mistress. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, hardly understanding his own excitement.

She stood still regarding him with an expression that was half-amused and half-disdainful. "I didn't know you were so keen on long walks," she remarked, "or on getting away from here. Isn't this rather a new departure for you?"

The look of eagerness left his face. "Perhaps it is," he said stiffly. "And it's hardly likely to be much of a success if--if you're going to take that sort of tone."

"I told you that I didn't want you to come," she replied, and there was something of defiance in her tone and in the pose of her firm, upright figure.

"I should at least like to know why you have taken such a dislike to me," he said. "But you might not feel inclined to tell me that in any case."

"Oh! dislike," she responded, almost contemptuously. "That's much too strong a word."

He had a sense of hopeless frustration. All her half-unwilling responses appeared now to have been nothing more than a condescension to his ineptitude. And he was all too horribly conscious of the fact that he deserved nothing better than her contemptuous opinion of him. He was just an average young man of twenty-eight. He had done nothing that thousands of other young men had not done as well or better. The only boast he could have made would have been that of ambition, a boast that was no longer possible for him after his recent admission that he meant to stay on at Hartling and liked being there. He knew intuitively what her reply would be, if he told her that he meant to study, to prepare himself for the work of a specialist. Indeed, he himself saw that project, now, as little more than a fatuous piece of self-deception. Practice was what he wanted: book-work would be no good without that. And in five years he would be soft and over-fed; his nerve would be gone.

He looked down and began to trace the pattern of the carpet with his toe. "Yes, I'm not worth hating," he muttered.

She turned away with a gesture of impatience. "Well, shall you be ready in ten minutes?" she threw at him over her shoulder.

"But if you would so much sooner I didn't come ..." he conceded humbly.

"I'll meet you in the hall," she said, as she went out.

He hesitated again while he was putting on his shoes. If she merely despised him, as she obviously did, what was the use of trying to win her confidence? Nothing he could say or do would alter her opinion of him. He had nothing to say. There was nothing he could do. The most he could hope for would be to defend his position by argument. He had little doubt that her contempt for him was based on the fact that he had consented to stay on at Hartling; and it might be well that she had not, as yet, a proper understanding of his reasons. She might not have heard of his verbal compact with the family made the previous day? Was it worth while attempting his own defence?

He was still weighing that question when she joined him in the hall. He continued to weigh it as they walked together in silence down the length of the garden.

The clouds were lifting, and before they reached the big gates the sun broke through. He looked up, noted the promise of a hot, fine day, and his spirits began to rise. What did it matter whether or not she despised him? He was a free man. He was not in any way dependent upon her opinion. If she chose to snub him, he could leave her to continue her walk alone. He could be perfectly happy without her. He was twenty-eight, in perfect health, and without a care in the world. Why shouldn't he enjoy life in his own way? If he had a regret at that moment, it was that he had eaten hardly any breakfast.

He began to whistle softly under his breath. He had no intention of beginning the conversation. He was content to enjoy the day and the adventure of this walk--the first he had undertaken since he had come to Hartling. Except for the path to the links and the links themselves, he knew nothing of the country round about. None of the family ever seemed to bother about going outside the grounds. They had this amazing garden and were, presumably, satisfied with that.

How little Eleanor was satisfied with it, however, was shown the moment they passed through the gates into the dusty high-road. She set back her shoulders, lifted her head, and gave a sigh of relief. "It's going to be fine, after all," she said. "I think we'll strike across country to a place I know where we can look right over to the South Downs. It's so big and open there."

There was no hint of embarrassment or restraint in her manner. She might have forgotten everything that had passed between them that morning; and Arthur, on his side, was quite willing to postpone his arguments and explanations, or even to omit them altogether. If she were going to treat him decently for the time being, that was all he asked.

"Sounds jolly," he said.

"It's seven or eight miles," she warned him.

"Oh! that's nothing," he returned. "_I'm_ good for all that and more. But are _you_?"

"I've done it twice in the last ten days," she said.

"This holiday of yours is not altogether an exception to the general rule, then?" he asked.

"I've been out several times--lately," she admitted.

He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?"

She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind.

They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead.

Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though."

"We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?"

He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind."

"Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about--being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't."

She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war.

"I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess--Elizabeth and I shared a governess then--not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness.

"But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said.

"I might have been a nurse," she protested.

"If you had you couldn't have come in till right at the end," he returned, "and, Lord, we had quite enough amateurs at that game as it was. Though, as it happens, it crossed my mind that you would make a good nurse the first time I saw you."

"_I_ believe I should, too," she agreed. "I hope I may be some day."

He made no comment on that though he was aware that something within him resented the thought of her ever becoming a professional nurse.

"You _did_ go through the war, at all events," she went on, rather as if she sought an excuse for him.

"I, and about five million other men," he put in, determined to take no credit on that score.

"It makes a difference, all the same," she returned.

"To what?" he asked.

"Oh! everything comes back to the same place," she said, looking out straight in front of her. "I knew it would, when you asked to come with me. When I'm alone I'm dishonest enough to forget--deliberately. I can--generally. I lose myself in other thoughts."

"Meaning that I'm spoiling your day," he put in. "But I don't see why we should talk about--_that_--if you'd sooner not. I can forget too."

"No, no, we _must_ talk about it," she said, "only I find it so difficult to begin. There are some things--one thing at all events that you don't know and that I find it very hard to tell you. But let's wait until after lunch. You had no breakfast, and I know a funny little lost place on our way, where we can get something to eat. It won't be anything but ham and eggs, and bread and cheese, of course."

Arthur felt that he wanted nothing better just then, and said so.

"Afterwards," she concluded, "we will go to that place where you look across to the South Downs, and--and--have it all out."