men serve women kneeling; when they get on their feet they go
away.
guy oscard stood for a moment on the threshold. he heard the door close behind him, and he took two steps farther forward.
jack meredith and millicent were at the fireplace. there was a heap of disordered paper and string upon the table, and a few wedding presents standing in the midst of their packing.
millicent's pretty face was quite white. she looked from meredith to oscard with a sudden horror in her eyes. for the first time in her life she was at a loss—quite taken aback.
“oh-h!” she whispered, and that was all.
the silence that followed was tense as if something in the atmosphere was about to snap; and in the midst of it the wheels of sir john's retreating carriage came to the ears of the three persons in the drawing-room.
it was only for a moment, but in that moment the two men saw clearly. it was as if the veil from the girl's mind had fallen—leaving her thoughts confessed, bare before them. in the same instant they both saw—they both sped back in thought to their first meeting, to the hundred links of the chain that brought them to the present moment—they knew; and millicent felt that they knew.
“are you going to be married to-morrow?” asked guy oscard deliberately. he never was a man to whom a successful appeal for the slightest mitigation of justice could have been made. his dealings had ever been with men, from whom he had exacted as scrupulous an honour as he had given. he did not know that women are different—that honour is not their strong point.
millicent did not answer. she looked to meredith to answer for her; but meredith was looking at oscard, and in his lazy eyes there glowed the singular affection and admiration which he had bestowed long time before on this simple gentleman—his mental inferior.
“are you going to be married to-morrow?” repeated oscard, standing quite still, with a calmness that frightened her.
“yes,” she answered rather feebly.
she knew that she could explain it all. she could have explained it to either of them separately, but to both together, somehow it was difficult. her mind was filled with clamouring arguments and explanations and plausible excuses; but she did not know which to select first. none of them seemed quite equal to this occasion. these men required something deeper, and stronger, and simpler than she had to offer them.
moreover, she was paralysed by a feeling that was quite new to her—a horrid feeling that something had gone from her. she had lost her strongest, her single arm: her beauty. this seemed to have fallen from her. it seemed to count for nothing at this time. there is a time that comes as surely as death will come in the life of every beautiful woman—a time wherein she suddenly realises how trivial a thing her beauty is—how limited, how useless, how ineffectual!
millicent chyne made a little appealing movement towards meredith, who relentlessly stepped back. it was the magic of the love that filled his heart for oscard. had she wronged any man in the world but guy oscard, that little movement—full of love and tenderness and sweet contrition—might have saved her. but it was oscard's heart that she had broken; for broken they both knew it to be, and jack meredith stepped back from her touch as from pollution. his superficial, imagined love for her had been killed at a single blow. her beauty was no more to him at that moment than the beauty of a picture.
“oh, jack!” she gasped; and had there been another woman in the room that woman would have known that millicent loved him with the love that comes once only. but men are not very acute in such matters—they either read wrong or not at all.
“it is all a mistake,” she said breathlessly, looking from one to the other.
“a most awkward mistake,” suggested meredith, with a cruel smile that made her wince.
“mr. oscard must have mistaken me altogether,” the girl went on, volubly addressing herself to meredith—she wanted nothing from oscard. “i may have been silly, perhaps, or merely ignorant and blind. how was i to know that he meant what he said?”
“how, indeed?” agreed meredith, with a grave bow.
“besides, he has no business to come here bringing false accusations against me. he has no right—it is cruel and ungentlemanly. he cannot prove anything; he cannot say that i ever distinctly gave him to understand—er, anything—that i ever promised to be engaged or anything like that.”
she turned upon oscard, whose demeanour was stolid, almost dense. he looked very large and somewhat difficult to move.
“he has not attempted to do so yet,” suggested jack suavely, looking at his friend.
“i do not see that it is quite a question of proofs,” said oscard quietly, in a voice that did not sound like his at all. “we are not in a court of justice, where ladies like to settle these questions now. if we were i could challenge you to produce my letters. there is no doubt of my meaning in them.”
“there are also my poor contributions to—your collection,” chimed in jack meredith. “a comparison must have been interesting to you, by the same mail presumably, under the same postmark.”
“i made no comparison,” the girl cried defiantly. “there was no question of comparison.”
she said it shamelessly, and it hurt meredith more than it hurt guy oscard, for whom the sting was intended.
“comparison or no comparison,” said jack meredith quickly, with the keenness of a good fencer who has been touched, “there can be no doubt of the fact that you were engaged to us both at the same time. you told us both to go out and make a fortune wherewith to buy—your affections. one can only presume that the highest bidder—the owner of the largest fortune—was to be the happy man. unfortunately we became partners, and—such was the power of your fascination—we made the fortune; but we share and share alike in that. we are equal, so far as the—price is concerned. the situation is interesting and rather—amusing. it is your turn to move. we await your further instructions in considerable suspense.”
she stared at him with bloodless lips. she did not seem to understand what he was saying. at last she spoke, ignoring guy oscard's presence altogether.
“considering that we are to be married to-morrow, i do not think that you should speak to me like that,” she said with a strange, concentrated eagerness.
“pardon me, we are not going to be married to-morrow.”
her brilliant teeth closed on her lower lip with a snap, and she stood looking at him, breathing so hard that the sound was almost a sob.
“what do you mean?” she whispered hoarsely.
he raised his shoulders in polite surprise at her dulness of comprehension.
“in the unfortunate circumstances in which you are placed,” he explained, “it seems to me that the least one can do is to offer every assistance in one's power. please consider me hors de concours. in a word—i scratch.”
she gasped like a swimmer swimming for life. she was fighting for that which some deem dearer than life—namely, her love. for it is not only the good women who love, though these understand it best and see farther into it.
“then you can never have cared for me,” she cried. “all that you have told me,” and her eyes flashed triumphantly across oscard, “all that you promised and vowed was utterly false—if you turn against me at the first word of a man who was carried away by his own vanity into thinking things that he had no business to think.”
if guy oscard was no great adept at wordy warfare, he was at all events strong in his reception of punishment. he stood upright and quiescent, betraying by neither sign nor movement that her words could hurt him.
“i beg to suggest again,” said jack composedly, “that oscard has not yet brought any accusations against you. you have brought them all yourself.”
“you are both cruel and cowardly,” she exclaimed, suddenly descending to vituperation. “two to one. two men—gentlemen—against one defenceless girl. of course i am not able to argue with you. of course you can get the best of me. it is so easy to be sarcastic.”
“i do not imagine,” retorted jack, “that anything that we can say or do will have much permanent power of hurting you. for the last two years you have been engaged in an—intrigue, such as a thin-skinned or sensitive person would hardly of her own free will undertake. you may be able to explain it to yourself—no doubt you are—but to our more limited comprehensions it must remain inexplicable. we can only judge from appearances.”
“and of course appearances go against me—they always do against a woman,” she cried rather brokenly.
“you would have been wise to have taken that peculiarity into consideration sooner,” replied jack meredith coldly. “i admit that i am puzzled; i cannot quite get at your motive. presumably it is one of those—sweet feminine inconsistencies which are so charming in books.”
there was a little pause. jack meredith waited politely to hear if she had anything further to say. his clean-cut face was quite pallid; the suppressed anger in his eyes was perhaps more difficult to meet than open fury. the man who never forgets himself before a woman is likely to be an absolute master of women.
“i think,” he added, “that there is nothing more to be said.”
there was a dead silence. millicent chyne glanced towards guy oscard. he could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. but, unfortunately, he was only a human being—a man who was ready to give as full a measure as he exacted. the unfortunate mistake to which he clung was that the same sense of justice, the same code of honour, must serve for men and women alike. so millicent chyne looked in vain for that indulgence which is so inconsistently offered to women, merely because they are women—the indulgence which is sometimes given and sometimes withheld, according to the softness of the masculine heart and the beauty of the suppliant feminine form. guy oscard was quite sure of his own impressions. this girl had allowed him to begin loving her, had encouraged him to go on, had led him to believe that his love was returned. and in his simple ignorance of the world he did not see why these matters should be locked up in his own breast from a mistaken sense of chivalry to be accorded where no chivalry was due.
“no,” he answered. “there is nothing more to be said.”
without looking towards her, jack meredith made a few steps towards the door—quietly, self-composedly, with that perfect savoir-faire of the social expert that made him different from other men. millicent chyne felt a sudden plebeian desire to scream. it was all so heartlessly well-bred. he turned on his heel with a little half-cynical bow.
“i leave my name with you,” he said. “it is probable that you will be put to some inconvenience. i can only regret that this—denouement did not come some months ago. you are likely to suffer more than i, because i do not care what the world thinks of me. therefore you may tell the world what you choose about me—that i drink, that i gamble, that i am lacking in—honour! anything that suggests itself to you, in fact. you need not go away; i will do that.”
she listened with compressed lips and heaving shoulders; and the bitterest drop in her cup was the knowledge that he despised her. during the last few minutes he had said and done nothing that lowered him in her estimation—that touched in any way her love for him. he had not lowered himself in any way, but he had suavely trodden her under foot. his last words—the inexorable intention of going away—sapped her last lingering hope. she could never regain even a tithe of his affection.
“i think,” he went on, “that you will agree with me in thinking that guy oscard's name must be kept out of this entirely. i give you carte blanche except that.”
with a slight inclination of the head he walked to the door. it was characteristic of him that although he walked slowly he never turned his head nor paused.
oscard followed him with the patient apathy of the large and mystified.
and so they left her—amidst the disorder of the half-unpacked wedding presents—amidst the ruin of her own life. perhaps, after all, she was not wholly bad. few people are; they are only bad enough to be wholly unsatisfactory and quite incomprehensible. she must have known the risk she was running, and yet she could not stay her hand. she must have known long before that she loved jack meredith, and that she was playing fast and loose with the happiness of her whole life. she knew that hundreds of girls around her were doing the same, and, with all shame be it mentioned, not a few married women. but they seemed to be able to carry it through without accident or hindrance. and illogically, thoughtlessly, she blamed her own ill-fortune.
she stood looking blankly at the door which had closed behind three men—one old and two young—and perhaps she realised the fact that such creatures may be led blindly, helplessly, with a single hair, but that that hair may snap at any moment.
she was not thinking of guy oscard. him she had never loved. he had only been one of her experiments, and by his very simplicity—above all, by his uncompromising honesty—he had outwitted her.
it was characteristic of her that at that moment she scarcely knew the weight of her own remorse. it sat lightly on her shoulders then, and it was only later on, when her beauty began to fade, when years came and brought no joy for the middle-aged unmarried woman, that she began to realise what it was that she had to carry through life with her. at that moment a thousand other thoughts filled her mind—such thoughts as one would expect to find there. how was the world to be deceived? the guests would have to be put off—the wedding countermanded—the presents returned. and the world—her world—would laugh in its sleeve. there lay the sting.
