CHAPTER VII

PETER

On reaching home, Stuart found Baldwin Carr awaiting him in the dining-room.

“Hullo! you’re a late visitor.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” said Baldwin, from whose brow the unwonted lines of anxiety had now been ironed away. “The whole business was a fake--and Gobert has vanished off the face of the earth.”

This was sensational. Stuart helped himself to a whisky and soda.

“What do you mean by fake? the envelope----”

“Empty, my boy. Blank bit of paper, that’s all. Jove! you should have seen the faces when it was opened. Old Rosenstein! Of course we smelt a rat, and sent round to Monsieur Antoine’s apartments. Not a sign of him. Left that morning, the landlady said; bag, baggage--and incidentally, our fifty thousand. Still, compared with what it might have cost us--well, what do you think of it?”

“I take off my hat to Gobert,” replied the other, with an amused chuckle; “fifty thou. isn’t too much to pay for the privilege of acquaintance with the swindler who can rob you of it.”

“Well--ah--I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Pour me out a stiff one, Stuart, I’m just about done up. And then I must be off. Wanted to set your mind at rest first. Where have you been all these hours? Not that I blame you for bunking,”--Stuart smiled--“the strain was intolerable. I’d have escaped from the office myself, only I thought it hardly fair to Derwent.”

Nor did his nephew seek to explain the real goad which had driven him forth to pace the streets from five o’clock that April afternoon.

Baldwin set down his glass: “Good night----” he paused. Something like emotion shook his voice. “We’ve pulled through,” he said. And Stuart, knowing the other was only recalled from adding: “we Herons,” by a consideration of facts, composed his face to lines befitting the occasion, and solemnly grasped the extended hand. Baldwin’s pulling may have been of a negative order, but of his pride in firm and family, no man could remain in doubt.

Stuart fell asleep that night lulled by memory of a sweet tremulous mouth, and dark eyes, deeply tender; of a blur of _eau-de-nil_ in a setting of pale primrose and dim grey; of cool fingers quelling to peace all the hot turbulence that tormented him; of a soft voice saying: “We can’t do without you, Stuart....”

He awoke next day to the same memory, lashing him with whips of shame. The deadly panic which had resulted from his conduct of the preceding morning, panic of clogging with moral and mental fat, his vision of worlds beyond and his capacity for play, was as nothing compared to the revolt with which he now viewed his breakdown of the evening: the brimming to the surface of weak sentiment, to find solace in a girl’s caresses. Twice--twice in twelve hours to have lost control of himself; to have taken his hand from the tiller twice; to have twice resigned stage management to an unseen power, which derided, even while it swung him from “a sense of business responsibility” to an extreme of maudlin hysteria. Stuart did not spare himself in terms of abuse. And Merle had encouraged him to make an exhibition of himself; Merle had lent a sympathetic ear to his woes; asked no questions; flooded him with rosy forgiveness. Merle had made it easy for him--easy and comfortable; dried his coat.... Stuart smouldered and chafed, seeing the incident pictured in bright colours: “A Little Mother,” and framed on the nursery wall, valued supplement to a Xmas number.

Why, in Heaven’s name, hadn’t she met him with conflict of some sort; mockery that might have braced him to action; instead of just allowing him to--slop. Verb which to Stuart expressed the apex of abomination.

A sense of justice reasserted itself. Merle was charming, no doubt of it; her response to his appeal a very idyll of fragrance and simplicity. As for his curt behaviour when the two girls had called on him in the office, well, Stuart was hardly sorry any more; save when the leprechaun recognized a glorious opportunity missed: to have proved himself able to cope with both situations in the appropriate spirit; with the light-hearted “come out to play,” in the midst of the almost unbearable tension consequent on the danger threatening the affairs of Heron and Carr.

--“Couldn’t have devised it better myself,” mused Stuart regretfully, as he gave Peter’s number to the telephone clerk.

* * * * *

Peter sprang out of bed, hearing the postman’s knock; and pattering barefoot downstairs, she drew from the box, Merle’s letter, in company of an oblong bill, and an envelope bearing St. Quentin’s by now familiar handwriting. Then, returning to her room, she seated herself on the edge of the bed; and, a pale-haired gleaner in the early sunshine, proceeded to examine her harvest.

The bill contained an intimation to the effect that Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was amazed that Miss Kyndersley should have ignored his repeated applications for payment, and could only suppose they had slipped her memory, as otherwise doubtless, etc.

“I call that a delicate way of putting it,” reflected Peter, with thoughts all of sunny kindness towards Mr. Lazarus. “He’s trying to spare my feelings, bless him. He shall have free tickets for dad’s next pier concert.”

Of paying there could be no question. Peter, true to the traditions of her caste, never settled her debts till actually threatened by the law; when she would hastily sell her silver hair-brushes, or borrow from her aunt, or pledge the half-of-her-next-year-but-one income; diminutive amount at best, inherited from her dead mother. She also had what she called her “submerged” periods, when by dint of forswearing the world for an entire fortnight, and working hard eight hours a day at colouring art postcards, she scraped together a sufficient sum to extricate her for a short while from the perpetual webs with which finance encumbered her pathway. Never yet had she been altogether free from pecuniary embarrassments; would indeed have missed the background of their mutterings, as those who have dwelt long by the sea cannot bear to be deprived of its eternal swish.

Mark St. Quentin, striving to mingle in equal proportions formality with infatuation, begged leave to visit her at Thatch Lane the following Sunday. Peter dimpled mischievously; she would wear a white dress, and playfully beg him to help lay the knives and forks for supper: “We have only one servant, you see; and treat you as quite one of the family”--and she dimpled again at the thought of Stuart’s disgust on anyone treating him as one of any family, anywhere.

Stuart ... a slight contraction of her bare toes, as she remembered how the said gentleman had incurred her displeasure. She wondered what his attitude was likely to be. Then opened Merle’s letter--and found out.

Peter raised her head; gazed straight through the window, across garden and hedge and field, to where the Weald hunched its back against the sky. But her eyes missed the tender greens and misty blues of the landscape; could not share in the joy of the house on discovering it at last owned, after five gloomy months, a clear black shadow to lay upon the dew-wet grass.

For she was wondering how not to be jealous.

It was not the incident itself which rankled; but recognition of a fact that long ago had carried its conviction, though only now its results: Merle was allowed, by the unseen code, to be the more feminine of the twain. She, Peter, thrust willy-nilly into the bolder, more challenging position. Was it that she was born with a tilt to her soul, as well as to her nose and chin? She could not tell. But Stuart, gravitating to her for all stimulation, had nevertheless gone to Merle for comfort. And Peter wondered furthermore why she played up so persistently to the Laughing-Cavalier qualities, with which from the very first he had chosen to endow her. And, wondering, knew yet that she must continue boyish and defiant; though she, even as Merle, wanted how much to be tender to him in his present attire of sackcloth and ashes.

The getting-up gong sounded, and Peter returned to bed.

The breakfast-gong, half an hour later, led her to the bathroom; and another quite irrelevant gong saw her wrestling with stockings. Only when the gongs finally ceased from troubling, did she descend to the dining-room, there to find Aunt Esther deeply immersed in the “Daily Camera.”

“Peter, just look at these!”

‘These’ were startling pictorial presentments of Antoine Gobert, the notorious diamond wizard; flanked on the one side by Sir Fergus Macpherson, looking like a Jew, which he wasn’t; on the other, by an elderly and speckled Stuart: “youngest partner in the firm of Heron & Carr.” Below appeared sensational accounts of the shameful fraud which had been practised, and the scene which took place in a private room of the Bank of England, at 6.30 p.m. of the previous day, when the bubble was pricked.

Peter’s lip curled as she read. So that accounted for Stuart’s sudden mood of contrition. Easy enough to find time for being sorry, after the cause of anxiety had been removed. It required no Stuart Heron for that. Nor did she consider that the strain adequately accounted for his preoccupation of the morning. According to his own standards, he should be strung up to response at any moment, however inopportune. If he could be exacting, why, so also could she. Quite cured of her yearnings towards womanly tenderness, she tossed aside the paper, and helped herself to eggs and bacon.

“Well, well,” quoth Miss Esther, “I always say that foreigners aren’t to be trusted; and I’m sure it’s very nice and pleasant to think young Mr. Heron isn’t going to be a bankrupt after all. Of course he has rather more money than he knows what to do with; but still, it’s better in the hands of a gentleman than a rogue. And these things will get in the papers, and there you are! What can you expect? However, there’s no harm done; the Bank of England is too wide-awake for that. And,” an after-thought, “Heaven will punish the swindler, I’ve no doubt.”

Thus having, according to custom, neatly packed away the entire set of events within her own private and particular boundaries; reduced each participant, including Heaven and the Bank of England, to a height convenient for patting on the head, Miss Esther Worthing asked for the marmalade.

The telephone bell rang. Peter dashed up the stairs, prepared to spurn still further into the dust the bowed and prostrate figure at the other end of the wire. Stuart’s cheery greeting, however, did not quite coincide with her expectations.

“Hullo! That you, Peter ... dear?” almost a sub-current of amusement in his tone. “What’s the attitude?”

“Bellicose,” was the spirited retort.

“Thought so. It would have been so much less obvious on your part, to have held out the hand of forgiveness.”

“You want a Briareus of forgiveness, it seems.”

“Oh. So you’ve heard from Merle.”

“Yes.”

Silence for a moment. Then:

“Doesn’t the fact that of my own accord I regained the sense of things--or rather the nonsense of things, doesn’t it all absolve me from your wrath?” still that slight mocking inflection. Peter thought how pleasant it would be to hurt him. Hurt him quite badly.

“Of your own accord?” she flung indignantly into the mouthpiece. “Why, I’ve seen the papers. Naturally, _after_ your business troubles were so unexpectedly smoothed out, you had leisure to turn your attention to--minor matters.”

“As it happened,”--she could not complain now of too light a note in the icy incision of his speech, “I did not know that the Gobert thunderbolt had been averted, until I reached home after seeing Merle.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I did not know.”

“The envelope was opened towards half-past six, according to the Press.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

“And Merle writes that you turned up about nine o’clock.”

“To be exact, a quarter to nine.”

“And yet you knew nothing?”

“And yet I knew nothing.”

Their speeches followed each other with the thud and rebound of a swift rally over the tennis-net.

“The evidence is against you.”

“I’m not on my defence. I merely state facts.”

Peter said very gently: “Do you expect me to believe them?”

“You will--later. At present you are merely laying yourself open to the unpleasant necessity of apologizing.”

“Apologizing?” she cried, hotly resenting this turning of the tables. “For what?”

“For calling me a liar.”

“I didn’t use the word.”

“Then use it--now.”

“You’re a liar, Stuart.”

She was unable to tell if his evident anger were assumed or genuine. But, if the latter, so much the better; she anticipated a pleasurable excitement from the unexplored territory beyond the limits of his tolerance.

He was speaking again. And Peter wished he would free his voice from its straining bonds of control.

“Quite right. I am a liar. A very plausible and rather dangerous liar. But, quite by accident, in the present instance I happen to be speaking the truth. When you’ve recovered from your attitude of scepticism, ring me up. Good-bye.”

Peter went for a walk. She walked hard for a couple of hours; avoided the plunging soil of pasture-land, in favour of hard country roads, where her feet met with a ringing resistance. On reaching a village, six miles distant from Thatch Lane, she entered without hesitation the local post-office.

... “Hullo!”

“Stuart.”

“Yes?”

“I discard my attitude.”

“From weakness?”

“No. From conviction.”

“Good. Thank you.”

She rang off.

* * * * *

In this wise, the trio forfeited their first fine carelessness. Disintegration was imminent, though none could tell as yet which way it would manifest itself. Each of their words and actions, however trivial, took on a certain significance. For Stuart had heard in Peter’s voice the battle-ring, and tingled to its challenge. For Peter had known an instant’s jealousy of Merle. For Merle had battled with the temptation to be disloyal towards Peter. For Stuart had twice in a day ceased to be master of his moods, and vowed by all his gods these moods should neither recur again. For Merle cherished the second of them as a memory sweeter than music. For Merle had been visited by an old ghost, and by a merry host of new ones. For Peter had definitely flung her cloak, tossed her plume, donned the disguise which Stuart mistook for nature. For all these follies and cross-follies are the outcome of certain fatal desires to go a-maying on a day of April!