Part 12

He was quite content with that. Whatever "having it all out" might portend, she was treating him now frankly and with a certain confidence. Her manner since they had left Hartling behind them, had completely changed. She might presently criticise him in a way that he would find intolerable. They might openly quarrel. But anything would be better to endure than that air of contempt and reserve she had displayed at breakfast. He would, at least, be given the opportunity to defend himself. He felt sure that she had not understood his attitude, as yet.

Their immediate difficulty was to find a topic of conversation that would avoid any kind of reference to the affairs of Hartling, and a few experiments further demonstrated how the thought of those affairs was, just then, obsessing them to the exclusion of all other interests. All that seemed possible were disjointed scraps of comment upon the scenery, or the wild flowers and ferns of that luxuriant Sussex country--until they reached Eleanor's little wayside inn, and could drop into the familiar interchanges of two rather hungry young people awaiting the inevitable fried ham and eggs that was being prepared for them.

The inn lay in a valley, and as soon as they finished their meal, Eleanor pointed to the hill in front of them.

"We have to climb that and then we are there," she said. "Shall we go now?"

Arthur agreed willingly enough. He was both eager and apprehensive; at once anxious to hear what she had to say and a little fearful of the effect. So long as they could walk together in silence he had a pleasant feeling of content in her company. Surely she liked him better since they had been alone together? She had not given the least sign of despising him in the course of the past two hours.

Yet even when they had reached the summit of the hill that marked the limit of their journey, Eleanor still hesitated.

She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky.

Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life.

They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,--

"Well, shall we talk now and--and get it over?"

She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,--

"We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same--perhaps for years and years."

"In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this--this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope."

"It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling."

He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; _why_?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension.

"Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to--to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply, "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?"

He waited for a few seconds after she had finished before he said quietly, "I ought to have guessed really; but I didn't. He said something to me about it yesterday morning--that he had hoped you and I would be friends, or something of the sort."

"And you, what did you say?" she put in.

"I told him that I was afraid you didn't like me, and then he said that in that case there was nothing more to be done. We didn't mention it again. It was before I told him about Hubert."

"Though, whether I like you or not has nothing whatever to do with it, of course," she commented thoughtfully.

"Hasn't it?" he asked, as if he doubted that inference.

"Nothing whatever," she insisted.

"Still if--I mean--it seems to me that ..." he began; but she cut him short by saying with an impatient lift of her chin,--

"I know what you mean, perfectly well. You needn't try to put it into words. That isn't really the point at all."

"What is the point then?" he asked in bewilderment. "I may be frightfully stupid, but I can't quite see...."

She turned her face still farther away from him as she said in a scarcely audible voice, "Nothing should ever induce me to be a bait for you."

A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them.

"You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to--throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction.

"Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly.

"But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?"

"He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you--you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he--he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's--oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him.

"Oh! surely not," Arthur protested.

She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said.

"He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically.

"Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time.

"Something," he acknowledged.

"Did he tell you how my father pleaded with him, offered to do or to be anything, if only he might be allowed to marry my mother?"

Arthur shook his head. "No, he didn't tell me that. What was his objection?" he said.

"My father never knew--unless it was that my mother had no money of her own. I only know what Uncle Joe told me, of course, but he heard all about it at the time. I don't believe that he had any real objection. You can never be sure whether he will say yes or no to anything, but you may be quite certain whichever it is, that he will stick to it afterwards whatever happens. And he said 'No' to my father, and turned him out of the house because he was willing to give up anything in the world rather than my mother. And when he had been gone about a month he sent that elephant's foot that stands in the hall. He meant it as an insult. Uncle Joe says that they were afraid to tell him. They all knew what it meant, of course; that it was a sort of symbol of his methods. But he wasn't the least bit insulted. He seemed to be proud of it, and had it put where it is now, for every one to see."

She had been speaking rapidly, almost fiercely, with an excitement completely unlike her usual rather staid manner.

"But why have you gone on staying there if you feel like that?" Arthur asked.

She put her hands up to her face for a moment and then looked at him with a whimsical smile. "You aren't the only person who has been blind," she said.

"Do you mean that you have only been feeling like that just lately?" he asked.

"I was only seven when I came," she said, "and I was brought up there. I never went to school. And you take things for granted when you're brought up in a place because it's the only world you know, and you think the others must be much about the same. I did begin to wake up a little in the last year of the war, but even then it all seemed natural enough in a way. He was so old, and one made all sorts of excuses for him. And then, of course, for months or even years at a time he seems to be as sweet and gentle as any one could be. He can be most awfully kind to people...." She paused on a reflective note, as if she still sought excuses for him.

"But what happened to make you change your mind just lately?" Arthur prompted her.

She blushed vividly, and again turned her eyes towards the lavender distances of the downs. "I've really seen the thing happening for myself," she said in a low voice. "I'd had hints from Uncle Joe before, plenty of them; but like you I didn't believe them. There was more excuse for me. I had been brought up with it. I believed he was odd, eccentric. He might seem rather cruel sometimes; but I thought, as I suppose you do still, that he was really trying to do the best for every one."

"But you don't now?" Arthur asked.

"I've been watching him--and thinking--since you came," she said slowly, hesitating between her phrases. "And it has seemed--as if I had got the key of a puzzle that had been worrying me. It--it worked. It accounted for so much that had been just a little mysterious. I have had, sometimes, a horrid feeling of uneasiness and have been angry with myself for doubting him. But after you came--I suppose it was just an accident that it was connected with you, more particularly; it would have been just the same with any one else, of course--well after that, as I said just now, I saw it all happening."

She paused, but Arthur made no reply. He was leaning on his elbow looking down over the broken sweep of the weald. For him, the "key" of which she had spoken was not yet plain. There were traits in the character of the old man, that Arthur believed were not consistent with Eleanor's judgment of him as "inhuman."

His mind was busy with the search for excuses and extenuations, when Eleanor began in a new voice, "I suppose you think it very rotten of me to have said all that about him, and, in any case, you don't believe me."

"I do; I do," Arthur protested, rousing himself from his abstraction. "I don't think it's rotten of you in the very least. What I'm doubting is whether your deductions are sound."

She appeared now to have given up any hope of persuading him, and looked at him with a frank smile as she said, "Well, I suppose we ought to be setting our faces towards home?"

"Oh, no! not yet," Arthur replied, with such evident distress in his voice that she laughed outright.

"But surely you must be pining to get back to your golf and billiards and croquet?" she suggested. "Or, if we start now, we might get in some tennis after tea."

"I don't believe I have ever heard you laugh before to-day," was Arthur's answer.

"It isn't exactly a gay house, is it?" she replied.

"My Lord, no, it isn't," Arthur agreed, after a moment's reflection; "though I don't think I'd thought of it like that before. Elizabeth always laughs as if she had been wound up inside and set going, and none of the others really laugh at all. Certainly Hubert doesn't. I wonder if Miss Martin will?"

Eleanor's face grew grave again. "Oh! the poor dear," she exclaimed. "She'll probably get my job."

"Your job?" Arthur ejaculated. "But you're not going to give it up, are you?"

She smiled tolerantly. "Didn't I begin by saying that?" she reminded him. "Either you or I will have to go, and it's quite clear that you can't."

"Can't?" he repeated "If _you_ go...."

She gave him no time to complete his sentence. "As you pointed out this morning," she put in quickly, "you've promised to stay. My conscience is clear of promises, at any rate."

"But, good Lord, where could you _go to_? What could you do?" he remonstrated.

"I could go to the Paynes," she said, "the people who brought me over from Rio. He has retired from the Cable Company and they're living at a place called Northwood, somewhere near London, I think. I couldn't stay with them indefinitely, of course, but they would help me to get something to do. I'm quite well educated for a commercial career. Grandfather didn't want me to learn typewriting and shorthand, but he's glad now, because they're so useful to him. _My_ job isn't a sinecure, you know. I do really work quite hard. You'd be surprised what a big correspondence my grandfather has about his money affairs. And then I've got French, and I can read German, though I write it rather badly. I should think I ought to be worth about three pounds a week."

"Oh, no!" Arthur exclaimed in despair. He could not endure the thought of her working in a city office.

"But oh, yes!" she said. "I was thinking about it all before you came. The war made me dissatisfied. We none of us did anything, and I couldn't help feeling what empty, useless lives we were living here."

"I don't see that you'd be doing anything more by working for a millionaire in the city than by working for Mr Kenyon," Arthur put in.

"I know. That weighed with me," she agreed. "What I really want is to be a nurse. Only I don't quite know how to begin. But you can tell me about that, can't you?"

He pushed her inquiry on one side. "I can't see," he said, "why either you or I have to leave. I can't really."

She had been talking to him freely, almost gaily, but now her manner took on the air of constraint with which she had begun the conversation.

"Need we go back to that?" she asked.

"Why, of course we must," he said in an aggrieved tone. "As far as I can see that's what we came out to talk about."

"But we settled it," she returned. "I'm going!"

"And if I went? If I broke my promise and went instead, would you stay?"

"I might for the sake of the others," she said. "I do help them a little. And in spite of everything, I'm sorry for him--for that wicked old man upstairs." She dropped her voice and looked down at her clasped hands as she concluded, "He _is_ wicked, although you may not believe it."

"Even so," Arthur argued, choosing to ignore that point for the moment, "I don't in the least understand why my going should make any difference one way or the other."

She bent her head a little lower as she said, "No doubt it's very quixotic and sentimental of me, but I can't bear to watch your life being ruined. It's different with the others. They're so helpless. Hubert is not fit to earn his own living, and Ken--if he comes--would probably be safer there than he would in town. He is very wild. If he comes, he'll probably marry Elizabeth and settle down."

Arthur saw that at last the time had come to set out his defence. "Yes, but why take it for granted that I should be wasting my life?" he began, and then, with one or two pauses at first, but gathering confidence in his own argument as he went on, he laid before her his plans for studying at Hartling and his hope for the future.

She listened to him attentively, attempting no comment, either by word or gesture until he had finished. He believed that he had convinced her, until she said gently,--

"And if my grandfather lives more than five years? What then?"

"He can't," Arthur expostulated. "People don't live as long as that."

"A few do," she said, "I saw in one of the papers a day or two ago, that Miss Spurgeon, the preacher's aunt, would be one hundred and one next month."

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "Frightfully exceptional case," he muttered.

"This might be a frightfully exceptional case, too," she insisted. "You don't find anything wrong with him, do you? And he lives such a sheltered, detached sort of life. Nothing ever upsets him. He hasn't altered the least little bit, all the years I have known him. And you know, don't you, that thirty years ago it began in just the same way with the others? They thought that he wouldn't live more than five years, or ten at the outside." She could not look at him, as she concluded gently, "Don't waste your life as they've done. Anything would be better than that."

He saw it all quite clearly. He knew that she was right. But something within him continued to protest fiercely against her advice. He could no longer doubt that she was entirely disinterested. He was consoled, even a trifle flattered, by the fact that she so evidently desired his welfare. But he didn't want to leave Hartling, and he feverishly sought excuses for staying. He could find half a dozen that would satisfy himself, but he knew them for sophistries and dared not put them into words.

She, on her side, seemed disinclined to add anything to what she had already said, and for some minutes they sat in silence. Eleanor returned to her study of the distant downs and Arthur, with his head in his hands, furiously sought an escape from the dilemma imposed by her two alternatives.

It was Eleanor who at last broke the long silence. "I must be going now," she said--sighed, rose to her feet, and began to brush and shake the grass from her skirt. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said," she continued, "and in any case we shall have plenty of time to say it on the way back."

He nodded rather resentfully and followed a pace or two behind her as they made their way down the hill. He could not as yet overcome the feeling that it was "hard lines" on him to be sent away from Hartling. For that was what it all amounted to. _He_ would have to go--promise or no promise. He could not possibly allow her to get work in some city office, or enter herself as probationer at a hospital, while he idled away his time at Hartling. Also he hated the thought of her mixing either with city clerks or young medical students. They were a coarse lot, and she would certainly meet with all kinds of beastly advances. In imagination he could hear the men at the hospital talking about her among themselves, and his face burnt with anger, first at the intolerable familiarities of his hypothetical students, and then with himself for thinking these thoughts in connection with her. Still she would know how to protect herself. No one could be more aloof and cold than she was sometimes. If that warm generosity of hers did not betray her? Those silly young fools at the hospital would not understand. They.... He found a relief in mentally cursing the particular type of young medical student he had all too vividly pictured. He saw himself taking one of them by the throat and choking the life out of him.

No, it was obvious that in no circumstances whatever, could she be permitted to face that kind of life. Plenty of nice girls did, of course; but she was different. And a city office would be just as bad, or worse. It was impossible to imagine her mixing with a crowd of dirty little Cockney clerks or greasy business men. Damn them.

After all, Peckham would not be so bad. Somers was one of the best and would be tremendously glad to hear that he was coming back. Only--that would be the end, so far as any hope of seeing Eleanor was concerned--until the old man died--and it was perfectly true, as she had said, that he might be an example of one of those exceptional cases of longevity. He saw the probability more clearly now that his interest was more detached. Up there at the house, they were compelled to cheat themselves with the belief that it could not last much longer. Life would not be endurable without that hope. They had been living on it, some of them, for forty years....

He suddenly awoke to the fact that this might be the last time he would be alone with Eleanor and that he was wasting it in these perfectly detestable reflections, when he might be talking to her.

"I've made up my mind," he said, quickening his pace to catch her up. "I'll go. You're quite right. I can't stay there now."

She looked up at him with a hint of question in her face.

"I couldn't stand the thought of your going into a hospital or an office," he continued. "You've no idea of the sort of thing that you have to put up with and the people that you have to mix with; no idea."

"Oh! but I don't want you to go in order to save _me_," she exclaimed.

"But _you'd_ go to save _me_," he returned.

She gave a little protesting laugh. "No, I shouldn't save you if I went," she said. "You would stay on here then. All I said was that I would not be used as an influence to make you stay. You remember what I told you about my grandfather's plans. Well, sooner than that, I'd do anything. It's purely selfish, I admit that. I don't mind your being ruined, you see, but I won't take any sort of responsibility for it."

"But in that case," he submitted. "I might stop on for a time at all events, if it was quite certain that _you_ weren't the case of my staying.

"No, no; don't begin like that," she broke out passionately. "Once you begin to procrastinate and find excuses there'll be no end to it. That must have been how they all began."

"You're evidently most frightfully anxious to get rid of me," he grumbled. He had seen a ray of hope and resented her instant extinction of it.

"Oh! don't be so babyish!" she said petulantly. "You must know that it hasn't anything to do with getting rid of you."

"I don't see what else it can be," he returned sulkily.

She shrugged her shoulders but attempted no other answer, and they did not speak again until they were back in the deep, overhung lane and within half a mile of Hartling. It was there that he made his last effort.

"Would it be risking too much if I stayed on for just one more week?" he asked. His spurt of temper had evaporated and he was once more humble, conciliating.

"Why a week?" she replied doubtfully.

He braced himself to make the test he had been considering for the last half-hour. "I should like to have one more talk with you before I go."

"And you wouldn't say anything to my grandfather in the meanwhile?"

"No. If I did he might sling me out."

"You believe he'd do that, then?"

"Oh, yes! I believe that."

"But not that he is--inhuman?"

"I find it difficult. No, I can't credit that."

"But you _would_ stick to your idea of going at the end of a week from now?"

"Absolutely."

"I wonder if it's wise to let you stay a week?" she murmured half to herself.

"Seven days surely can't make any difference," he pleaded.

"Exactly; so why have them?" she returned.

"No difference so far as my prospects are concerned," he said.

"Oh, no!" she replied quickly, as if she were afraid that he might go on to elaborate his reasons for wanting his week's grace. "But are you quite sure of yourself? Are you sure that at the end of the week you won't want to put it off again?"