Chapter 16

"No," said Caroline, speaking with fair composure, though her own nerves began to quiver and she breathed rather quickly. For this was what Laura had come for, then! She had heard tales and wanted to find out if they were true.

Well--let her! For one second a great temptation assailed Caroline. She stood there in the doorway, with the power of happiness or unhappiness in her hands, knowing perfectly well that she had only to tell the actual, unvarnished truth as it had actually happened for Godfrey's chance of a rich wife, and Laura's chance of a probably successful marriage to vanish in less time than you could open and shut the door.

But the next moment it was all over. She knew, with a just pride, that she could never do a mean trick like that: it was not in her. When the room, which had gone a little dim, grew clear again, she heard herself continuing, as if it were somebody else: "I'm sure I shall enjoy being on my own. I'd rather keep myself than be dependent on any man. You can do as you like. It's better than getting married."

"But nothing is better than marriage with the right man," said Laura. She was still looking intently at Caroline; still seeming all the time to have something behind her words which hovered but remained unspoken. Then, suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

Caroline looked away, perplexed and troubled. "I'm afraid Mrs. Bradford may not be in for some time."

Laura rose in a hesitating fashion. "Do you think so? Well, I suppose I had better go. Mrs. Bradford will be glad when the sale is over. She will be happier in a boarding-house at Scarborough."

They were at the front door now; and to avoid looking at each other they both glanced at the man who was wheeling a barrow-load of building implements in from the field across the place where the privet hedge used to be.

"I suppose that is for the improvements to the Cottage?" said Laura, who seemed as if she could not go and yet did not really want to stay.

"Yes. They begin altering the outside buildings before the sale," said Caroline; but all the time she was asking within herself: "What is it? What is it?"

Again they looked at the man, who was now trudging back over the newly-laid sods.

"Poor Miss Ethel!" said Laura. "She would not have liked that, would she?"

Caroline shook her head, not speaking--it was all so curiously far off from what they were both thinking about that words only seemed to echo from a distance. "There have to be changes," she said at last, growing afraid of the pause lest it should imply too much.

"Well, Miss Ethel always hated change," said Laura. Then her expression began to alter curiously under Caroline's eyes--becoming charged, as it were, with an inner radiance that shone right through the outer dullness, or embarrassment, or sadness--whatever there might be. "At any rate, she has gone where things are certain."

Caroline's heart beat fast with the sudden impact of discovery. Laura, too, then! They were both just like people hanging on to a spar in a rough sea and hoping to be thrown on shore at last. That was what life was, even when you were going to be married to the man of your choice. But the expression of Laura's face--or was it that thought of a rough sea?--had in some way brought back that time in the pay-box after Miss Ethel's death, when Caroline herself had looked up at the blue sky breaking through the grey. Once more she tried to grope across the barrier between the seen and the unseen.

What was there after all? Then a line of one of those Sunday-school hymns floated across her mind--"Oh, Thou that changest not"--And the thought of Miss Ethel on the stairs with that heavy pail in her hand.

But the thoughts passed so quickly that Laura had not noticed the pause. "I like to fancy Miss Ethel in a place where things don't change. It makes you think, when somebody you know goes----" And Caroline saw Laura felt the same; was drawn more closely in touch with this eternity to which Miss Ethel had just gone over.

Then a man over in the field shouted loudly to his mate. Both girls glanced, half startled, in that direction, and when they looked at each other again the mental atmosphere had quite altered.

"Well, I must be going," said Laura.

But it was still so evident she had left something unsaid, that Caroline remained half-consciously expectant in the doorway. And a few steps down the drive Laura did suddenly stop short, pause a moment and return with quick, nervous steps. "Oh, by the way, I suppose you won't know that my engagement with Mr. Wilson is broken off?"

For a moment--an age--Caroline's throat seemed to dry up, and she felt like a person in a nightmare struggling to make a sound which will not come. Then, out of all the turmoil of questions, fears, emotions that Laura's words had caused to seethe within her, she was only able to bring to the surface: "I--I didn't know."

"No?" Laura paused. "Well, you'll tell Mrs. Bradford I have been----" And she hurried away down the drive; but she had not yet lost that air of having left something unsaid which she had come on purpose to say.

Caroline could see her near the gate, then paused a moment as at the approach of voices; and the next minute Mr. and Mrs. Graham came in, accompanying Mrs. Bradford. Their attitudes were most plainly visible to Caroline in the doorway, though she could not hear what was said; Mrs. Bradford solidly engrossed in her own importance as a mourner--Mr. Graham bending forward to speak to Laura, conciliatory, voluble; and Laura herself unresponsive.

Caroline gave a last look at them before going indoors to take the potatoes from the fire; and as she did so, she experienced one of those sudden, blindingly clear moments of intuition common to almost every one, in which the processes of fact, argument, reason are all skipped, and the knowledge is there, full blown. She knew perfectly well that Mr. and Mrs. Graham had felt it their solemn duty to inform Laura--with the best intentions--of what was being said about Godfrey Wilson and the girl on the promenade.

But before she had time to turn away the group dissolved, Laura going on alone, while Mrs. Bradford and Mrs. Graham came up the drive. The picture bit like acid into her mind. The three coming up the path; the clear sky; the man with the barrow wheeling cement over the forlorn dismantled part of the garden where the privet hedge had been.

But in the kitchen, while she was taking the potatoes from the steamer, her face suddenly flushed crimson. "I aren't going to be frightened," she murmured to herself. "I aren't going to care what anybody says. She would never break off her engagement because of a bit of scandal. She's not that sort. They'll be married, all right."

Beneath her defiance, however, Caroline was terribly afraid. She sub-consciously so dreaded the agony she must endure if he did come after her again and she had to send him away. For that was what she would do. Never for one second did she waver in her determination to have no more to do with a man who could behave as he had done. She couldn't help loving him, but she could help trusting him with her life.

Mrs. Bradford appeared, black and bulky in the kitchen doorway. "Oh, Caroline----" And her voice, though heavy and rather husky, put the same immeasurable distance between Caroline and every Wilson in the world as Miss Ethel's clear tones, speaking the same words, had always done. "I am expecting Mr. Wilson on business after tea. Will you show him into the breakfast-room if you have not gone out when he comes?"

Caroline murmured acquiescence, angry to feel herself blushing; and when she looked up Mrs. Bradford's little eyes were fixed on her with the insatiable curiosity of the dull; so she looked steadily down again at the bowl of potatoes. After a pause that seemed very long, she heard the pad-pad-pad of a heavy, elderly woman's walk sounding along the passage.

Mrs. Bradford, waiting for her lunch, also looked at the wheel-marks left by the passing of the workman's barrow over the place where the privet hedge used to be. She might not like it, but she was without that fiery hatred of change which did actually release Miss Ethel's spirit for its escape to certainty.

_Chapter XXIII_

_On the Shore_

Mrs. Bradford was timid about being alone in the house after sunset since her sister's death, so Caroline usually went out between tea and early supper. On this occasion she hurried off directly tea was over, in her anxiety to avoid a possible meeting with Godfrey. She did not even wait to go upstairs and change her dress, but kept on the old blouse and skirt she had been wearing beneath her overall, put on an old garden hat and ran down the drive, fearing all the time to hear Mrs. Bradford calling from the doorway.

However, she reached the road in safety, thankful that there was now no chance of being obliged to usher in Godfrey with Mrs. Bradford's dull rather malicious gaze fixed on her. But even while she waited a second, out of breath, she caught sight of his figure coming along the road from the town, and hurried on again towards the cliff top. There was the bench on which she had sat that moonlight night with Godfrey, when it seemed to her that they could love each other for ever just the same, no matter what might divide them. She had been filled then with the exultation which is so difficult to distinguish at the time from happiness--which seems so independent of human accident--a joy never to be assailed by common experience.

But all that had gone. Now she was going down the rough, muddy path on the side of the clay cliff--slipping, making her shoes and skirt dirty, grasping at the wiry grass as she slipped and not caring--simply because she wanted to escape any chance of meeting the same man who had inspired those wonderful emotions. The contrast seemed to hit a blow on her heart, even though she was not going to let it hurt her any more. But at last she reached the bottom, and stood for a moment to rest.

The sea, heaving with a strong ground-swell, reflected the pale blue of the sky in millions of pools of light on the dun-coloured surface. She was not conscious of looking at it, but she had a feeling of freshness and consolation--of freedom from herself. The truth was that, without knowing it, she had made a friend of the sea. She had done so during all those hours in the pay-box on the promenade when she endured that hard spiritual experience which turns people from children into men and women--and the sea remains faithful.

After resting a moment or two she walked on, her path skirting the wet sea-weed which showed that there had been heavy weather outside the bay. The brown streamers had blue lights on them like the sea and the sand was firm and hard. A thick froth churned up from the deeps rested among the sea-weed, or blew along the shore in front of her before the south-easterly wind.

She inhaled the smell of fresh sea-weed--not exactly noticing it, but with her senses influenced by it, as a person's may be by the heavy scent of roses on a June evening. Less than ever was she going to give in because she had to do without love. There were plenty of things in life besides love----

Then, as if in answer to that defiance, she saw part of a man's shadow thrown by the westering sun on the sand before her. She swerved sharp round--not startled--not afraid; but filled with an extraordinary fury against Godfrey which may have been partly caused by these emotions.

"How dare you come creeping up after me on the sand like that?" she said. "Which way are you going? Tell me, and then I'll go the other."

He looked down at her with amusement and ardour in his glance; but all the same he bore the marks of some storm only just over in the strained lines of his face, and in the marks of sleeplessness under his eyes.

"You won't get rid of me so easily as that," he said. "I have come here to talk things out with you, and I mean to do it."

She turned back towards the promenade. "Of course, I can't prevent you walking with me if you will," she answered. But it was because she felt that her curiosity might betray her that she desperately slammed the door of opportunity in his face by adding: "I suppose you know you are safe here to worry me as much as you like. You won't come across Uncle Creddle on the sands."

"Your uncle----" He was rather thick-skinned and flushed seldom, but he did so now, growing crimson to the edge of the cap pulled down over his forehead. "Oh! I see. So you actually believed I was afraid. Turn round!" He took her arm and made her face him. "Now! Do I look as if I should be afraid to fight old Creddle?" She obstinately refused to answer, and he went on, still holding her: "You know I should not. I was thinking of you, and you only. Do you realize what people say about a girl when her nearest male relative breaks, or even tries to break a big stick over her lover's back? Well, I wasn't going to have anything of that sort said about you, Carrie."

"You were very thoughtful about my reputation all of a sudden," said Caroline. She paused, but the words had to come. "It was not because you wanted to keep any talk from getting to Miss Laura's ears, I suppose?"

The question was a sneer, but it was there, all the same; she had had to ask it. And now her whole being hung trembling on the answer, though she was no less grimly resolved than before to have done with a man whom she could not trust. But now he did not reply; and that burning urge of curiosity made Caroline go on--against better judgment, intention, pride: "Does she know?"

He released Caroline's arm at once and walked on. "Let us leave her out of the discussion," he said stiffly. "I was just about to tell you that our engagement is broken off."

But Caroline could not understand--any more than the majority of women--the feeling which makes a decent man reluctant to discuss an old love with a new one, and she was now easily able to speak as coldly as she wished. "I've heard that piece of news," she said.

He turned sharp round. "Why, who told you? It only happened last night."

"Miss Laura told me," she answered.

"What more did she tell you?" he asked quickly.

"Nothing."

He looked away from her to the sea without replying, and this was her chance to walk away, if she had wished; but there was still that question which she must have answered.

"Has Miss Laura heard anything about us? Was that why the engagement was broken off?"

He waited a moment. "No," he said. "After all, you have a right to know that you had nothing to do with it. Nothing. She had never heard a word about you and me until I told her myself; and that was after our engagement was broken off."

"Then why did you----?" She paused, so filled with all sorts of conflicting desires and emotions--longing to know, and yet passionately telling herself it didn't matter to her--that she had lost all certainty in herself, and her voice came sharp and tremulous.

"She simply threw me over," he said at last. "Found out she didn't like the idea of married life, though she was very fond of me. I suppose there are women like that in every civilized community. No doubt if she were a Roman Catholic she would be a nun, and she would be a good one. She's good all through. I realize that, in spite of what has happened."

Caroline looked at him as he faced the sea in the strong light--at his heavy features, his broadly set figure, his whole air of knowledge and virility and strength. Then the words fluttered up into her throat without any volition of her own: "Oh, you well may think her good! You well may!"

For in that moment she guessed what Laura had come to tell her but had not been able to say after all. That heavenly kindness of Laura's was actually deep enough and real enough to make her spare her lover the knowledge of how he had wounded her. It was clear enough that she--who always seemed so easy and simple--had detected the first little change in him when he became attracted to Caroline. So she had put off her wedding to make sure, and she had become sure.

Caroline opened her lips to say with passion: "Can't you _see_ what she did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own had really meant.

Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came to the point, for anything to be actually said.

Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness--to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness--of something fresh and cool despite her passion--which had caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he first held her in his arms.

"Well?" he said at last. "It's all right now, isn't it?"

She shook her head. "I'm not going to begin that all over again," she said rather drearily. "You made me look silly once, but you won't have a chance a second time. So long as you thought you might marry Miss Laura, you were afraid of the talk and kept out of my way. Now she has turned you down, you come after me again. I don't know why. Just for your own fun, I suppose. You can't deny you avoided me."

"No." He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "I don't. But I was in a devil of a hole, Caroline. I was engaged to marry a good girl, and a nice girl, and shortly after the wedding day was fixed I did a thing which only a cad would have done." He paused, Caroline gazing at him with wide eyes. Then he went on: "I borrowed a large sum of money from her."

"Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that made."

"Don't you? Well, perhaps not--but any man would," he answered. "I was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time."

"You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she said.

"I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or her."

She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to stop single?"

"No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though, of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell her I--I wasn't broken-hearted."

"She would wonder why, didn't she?" said Caroline, in a tone which he could not understand.

"Yes," he answered. "So I told her."

"What did you say?"

He waited a moment, looking down at the slim figure outlined darkly against the immense radiance of the sea. But he did not touch her. This was a different thing indeed from that hot wooing on the top of the cliff.

"I told her," he answered bluntly, at last, "that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you."

"And she----?" Caroline did not respond any more than that; incredibly, to him, she was still thinking about Laura---- And he stood looking at her with the same odd mixture of curiosity and desire which had all along marked his pursuit of her, though beneath it there was now something deeper, more human, more permanent. He wanted to know---- But even when he did know, she would be his--his to take care of and fight for and help up in the world.

At last he gave the answer she was waiting for. "Laura took it quite differently from what I expected," he said. "She was awfully decent about it. I think she was relieved, in a way, to find she had not got me on her mind. She must have been afraid I should be very unhappy, of course. She would always be so sorry about anything like that, that I wonder she had the heart to throw me over, even though she didn't want me."

Caroline said nothing. Oddly enough, though she had not heard the sound of the waves before, the melancholy swish! swish! now echoed through her very soul. When she felt a salt taste on her lips she thought it was a drop of spray from the sea, then she felt the faint trickling sensation of another and another running down her cheeks.

"Caroline!" he said, putting his arm about her and bending his face to hers. "You're crying! What is it, little girl?"

She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness which he found incomprehensible: "No! No! You can't start yet. You have her kisses on your mouth yet."

"You didn't seem to mind that before," he said, suddenly white with anger. "I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now everything is over."

"I'm not jealous," she said. "It is not that." Then she stopped short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.

"Well, you have no need to be jealous," he said. "She spoke nicely about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she would be friends."

"Oh! I wish we could be," said Caroline, but deep down in her own consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done more than herself for the man she loves.

He stood there disconsolately, kicking a pebble. He had come hot-foot to claim her, never anticipating a check; and now she seemed to be somehow drifting farther and farther away from him.

"I don't know if you are still thinking about the money Laura lent me," he said at last. "I begin to wish now I hadn't told you. But I wanted to have everything quite straight." He paused. "As a matter of fact, I have paid it back. The bank was a bit awkward at first, but I was able to come to an arrangement with them a day or two ago, and I have repaid Laura what she lent me." He paused again, looking at her almost comically: "There, I hope you quite understand?"

They were indeed talking to each other more like enemies than lovers; and Caroline seemed to be more than ever withdrawn and aloof--for all her ignorance and simplicity of feeling--when she answered him in an inward brooding tone: "Yes, I understand." For she really saw neither Godfrey nor the shore, only Laura coming flushed out of the door marked "Private" behind the bank counter. For now--at last--she did see where it all led. She had to join issue with Laura to spare the pride of this man whom both loved. His faith in his own power of overcoming difficulties was the foundation on which his life was built, and they must not pull it from under him. She, at any rate, could not so humiliate him.

"The difficulty was only temporary," he went on, trying to find out what she was waiting for. "I tried to do too much business for my capital. But I'm bound to get on. We shall be all right."

"Don't!" she said sharply. "I don't care about money. I wasn't thinking about that."

"Then what's the matter?"

She looked at him dumbly, and something in her tear-stained face tugged irresistibly at his heartstrings. "Don't look like that," he said. "Let's forget all that has happened before. You don't mean you will turn me down, too?"

She shook her head, still unable to keep back the tears.