“He’s not likely to,” said Fleur; “he’d rather die than be laughed at.”
“Exactly! I only mentioned it to show that the whole thing’s not so simple as it appears to the pukka sahib.”
“When,” murmured Sir Lawrence, in a detached voice, “have I heard anything so nicely ironical? But all this is not helping Dinny.”
“I think I’ll go and see him again,” said Michael.
“The simplest thing,” said Fleur, “is for him to resign at once.”
And with that common-sense conclusion the discussion closed.
CHAPTER 23
Those who love, when the object of their love is in trouble, must keep sympathy to themselves and yet show it. Dinny did not find this easy. She watched, lynx-eyed, for any chance to assuage her lover’s bitterness of soul; but though they continued to meet daily, he gave her none. Except for the expression of his face when he was off guard, he might have been quite untouched by tragedy. Throughout that fortnight after the Derby she came to his rooms, and they went joy-riding, accompanied by the spaniel Foch; and he never mentioned that of which all more or less literary and official London was talking. Through Sir Lawrence, however, she heard that he had been asked to meet the Committee of Burton’s Club and had answered by resignation. And, through Michael, who had been to see him again, she heard that he knew of Jack Muskham’s part in the affair. Since he so rigidly refused to open out to her, she, at great cost, tried to surpass him in obliviousness of purgatory. His face often made her ache, but she kept that ache out of her own face. And all the time she was in bitter doubt whether she was right to refrain from trying to break through to him. It was a long and terrible lesson in the truth that not even real love can reach and anoint deep spiritual sores. The other half of her trouble, the unending quiet pressure of her family’s sorrowful alarm, caused her an irritation of which she was ashamed.
And then occurred an incident which, however unpleasant and alarming at the moment, was almost a relief because it broke up that silence.
They had been to the Tate Gallery and, walking home, had just come up the steps leading to Carlton House Terrace. Dinny was still talking about the pre-Raphaelites, and saw nothing till Wilfrid’s changed expression made her look for the cause. There was Jack Muskham, with a blank face, formally lifting a tall hat as if to someone who was not there, and a short dark man removing a grey felt covering, in unison. They passed, and she heard Muskham say:
“That I consider the limit.”
Instinctively her hand went out to grasp Wilfrid’s arm, but too late. He had spun round in his tracks. She saw him, three yards away, tap Muskham on the shoulder, and the two face each other, with the little man looking up at them like a terrier at two large dogs about to fight. She heard Wilfrid say in a low voice:
“What a coward and cad you are!”
There followed an endless silence, while her eyes flitted from Wilfrid’s convulsed face to Muskham’s, rigid and menacing, and the terrier man’s black eyes snapping up at them. She heard him say: “Come on, Jack!” saw a tremor pass through the length of Muskham’s figure, his hands clench, his lips move:
“You heard that, Yule?”
The little man’s hand, pushed under his arm, pulled at him; the tall figure turned; the two moved away; and Wilfrid was back at her side.
“Coward and cad!” he muttered: “Coward and cad! Thank God I’ve told him!” He threw up his head, took a gulp of air, and said: “That’s better! Sorry, Dinny!”
In Dinny feeling was too churned up for speech. The moment had been so savagely primitive; and she had the horrid fear that it could not end there; an intuition, too, that she was the cause, the hidden reason of Muskham’s virulence. She remembered Sir Lawrence’s words: “Jack thinks you are being victimised.” What if she were! What business was it of that long, lounging man who hated women! Absurd! She heard Wilfrid muttering:
“‘The limit!’ He might know what one feels!”
“But, darling, if we all knew what other people felt, we should be seraphim, and he’s only a member of the Jockey Club.”
“He’s done his best to get me outed, and he couldn’t even refrain from THAT.”
“It’s I who ought to be angry, not you. It’s I who force you to go about with me. Only, you see, I like it so. But, darling, I don’t shrink in the wash. What IS the use of my being your love if you won’t let yourself go with me?”
“Why should I worry you with what can’t be cured?”
“I exist to be worried by you. PLEASE worry me!”
“Oh! Dinny, you’re an angel!”
“I repeat it is not so. I really have blood in my veins.”
“It’s like ear-ache; you shake your head, and shake your head, and it’s no good. I thought publishing The Leopard would free me, but it hasn’t. Am I ‘yellow,’ Dinny—am I?”
“If you were yellow I should not have loved you.”
“Oh! I don’t know. Women can love anything.”
“Proverbially we admire courage before all. I’m going to be brutal. Has doubt of your courage anything to do with your ache? Isn’t it just due to feeling that other people doubt?”
He gave a little unhappy laugh. “I don’t know; I only know it’s there.”
Dinny looked up at him.
“Oh! darling, don’t ache! I do so hate it for you.”
They stood for a moment looking deeply at each other, and a vendor of matches, without the money to indulge in spiritual trouble, said:
“Box o’ lights, sir?”…
Though she had been closer to Wilfrid that afternoon than perhaps ever before, Dinny returned to Mount Street oppressed by fears. She could not get the look on Muskham’s face out of her head, nor the sound of his: “You heard that, Yule?”
It was silly! Out of such explosive encounters nothing but legal remedies came nowadays; and of all people she had ever seen, she could least connect Jack Muskham with the Law. She noticed a hat in the hall, and heard voices, as she was passing her uncle’s study. She had barely taken off her own hat when he sent for her. He was talking to the little terrier man, who was perched astride of a chair, as if riding a race.
“Dinny, Mr. Telfourd Yule; my niece Dinny Cherrell.”
The little man bowed over her hand.
“Yule has been telling me,” said Sir Lawrence, “of that encounter. He’s not easy in his mind.”
“Neither am I,” said Dinny.
“I’m sure Jack didn’t mean those words to be heard, Miss Cherrell.”
“I don’t agree; I think he did.”
Yule shrugged. The expression on his face was rueful, and Dinny liked its comical ugliness.
“Well, he certainly didn’t mean YOU to hear them.”
“He ought to have, then. Mr. Desert would prefer not to be seen with me in public. It’s I who make him.”
“I came to your Uncle because when Jack won’t talk about a thing, it’s serious. I’ve known him a long time.”
Dinny stood silent. The flush on her cheeks had dwindled to two red spots. And the two men stared at her, thinking, perhaps, that, with her cornflower-blue eyes, slenderness, and that hair, she looked unsuited to the matter in hand. She said quietly: “What can I do, Uncle Lawrence?”
“I don’t see, my dear, what anyone can do at the moment. Mr. Yule says that he left Jack going back to Royston. I thought possibly I might take you down to see him tomorrow. He’s a queer fellow; if he didn’t date so, I shouldn’t worry. Such things blow over, as a rule.”
Dinny controlled a sudden disposition to tremble.
“What do you mean by ‘date’?”
Sir Lawrence looked at Yule and said: “We don’t want to seem absurd. There’s been no duel fought between Englishmen, so far as I know, for seventy or eighty years; but Jack is a survival. We don’t quite know what to think. Horse-play is not in his line; neither is a law court. And yet we can’t see him taking no further notice.”
“I suppose,” said Dinny, with spirit, “he won’t see, on reflection, that he’s more to blame than Wilfrid?”