CHAPTER XIX—THE SPIDER

PROBABLY masculine obtuseness and the feminine faculty for dissimulation are together responsible for more than half the broken hearts with which the highways of life are littered.

The Recalcitrant Parent, the Other Woman—be she never so guileful—or the Other Man, as the case may be, are none of them as potent a menace to the ultimate happy issue of events as the mountain of small misunderstandings which a man and a maid in love are capable of piling up for themselves.

The man is prone to see only that which the woman intends he shall—and no self-respecting feminine thing is going to unveil the mysteries of her heart until she is very definitely assured that that is precisely what the man in the case is aching for her to do.

So she dissimulates with all the skill which Nature and a few odd thousand years or so of tradition have taught her and pretends that the Only Man in the World means rather less to her than her second-best shoe buckles. With the result that he probably goes silently and sadly away, convinced that he hasn’t an outside chance, while all the time she is simply quivering to pour out at his feet the whole treasure of her love.

In this respect Blaise and Jean blundered as egregiously as any other love-befogged pair.

Following upon their quarrel over the matter of Jean’s attitude towards Geoffrey Burke, Tormarin retreated once again into those fastnesses of aloof reserve which seemed to deny the whole memory of that “magic moment” at Montavan. And Jean, just because she was unhappy, flirted outrageously with the origin of the quarrel, finding a certain reckless enjoyment in the flavour of excitement lent to the proceedings by the fact that Burke was in deadly earnest.

Playing with an “unexploded bomb” at least sufficed to take her thoughts off other matters, and enabled her momentarily to forget everything for which forgetting seemed the only possible and sensible prescription.

But you can’t forget things by yourself. Solitude is memory’s closest friend. So Jean, heedless of consequences, encouraged Burke to help her.

Lady Anne sometimes sighed a little, as she watched the two go off together for a long morning on the river, or down to the tennis-court, accompanied, on occasion, by Claire Latimer and Nick to make up the set. But she held her peace. She was no believer in direct outside interference as a means towards the unravelment of a love tangle, and all that it was possible to do, indirectly, she had attempted when she revealed to Jean the history of Blaise’s marriage.

She did, however, make a proposal which would have the effect of breaking through the present trend of affairs and of throwing Blaise and Jean more or less continuously into each other’s company. She was worldly wise enough to give its due value to the power of propinquity, and her innocently proffered suggestion that she and her two sons and Jean should all run up to London for a week, before the season closed, was based on the knowledge of how much can be accomplished by the skilful handling of a partie carr茅e.

The suggestion was variously received. By Blaise, indifferently; by Jean, with her natural desire to know more of the great city she had glimpsed en route augmented by the knowledge that a constant round of sight-seeing and entertainment would be a further aid towards the process of forgetting; by Nick, the sun of whose existence rose and set at Charnwood, with open rebellion.

“Why go to be baked in London, madonna, when we might remain here in the comparative coolth of the country?” he murmured plaintively to his mother.

They were alone at the moment, and Lady Anne regarded him with twinkling eyes.

“Frankly, Nick, because I want Jean for my daughter-inlaw. No other reason in the world. Personally, as you know, I simply detest town during the season.”

He laughed and kissed her.

“What a Machiavelli in petticoats! I’d never have believed it of you, madonna. S’elp me, I wouldn’t!”

“Well, you may. And you’ve got to back me up, Nick. No philandering with Jean, mind! You’ll leave her severely alone and content yourself with the company of your aged parent.”

“Aged fiddlestick!” he jeered. “If it weren’t for that white hair of yours, I’d tote you round as my youngest sister. ‘And I don’t believe”—severely—“that it is white, really. I believe your maid powders it for you every morning, just because you were born in sin and know that it’s becoming.”

So it was settled that the first week of July should witness a general exodus from Staple, and meanwhile the June days slipped away, and Tormarin sedulously occupied himself in adding fresh stones to the wall which he thought fit to interpose between himself and the woman he loved. While Jean grew restless and afraid, and flung herself into every kind of amusement that offered, wearing a little fine under the combined mental and physical strain.

Claire, perceiving the nervous tension at which the girl was living, was wistfully troubled on her friend’s behalf, and confided her anxious bewilderment to Nick.

“I think Blaise must be crazy,” she declared one day. “I’m perfectly convinced that he’s in love with Jean, and yet he appears prepared to stand by while Geoffrey Burke completely monopolises her.”

Nick nodded.

“Yes. I own I can’t understand the fellow. He’ll wake up one day to find that she’s Burke’s wife.”

“Oh, I hope not!” cried Claire hastily.

They were pacing up and down one of the gravelled alleys that intersected the famous rhododendron shrubbery at Charnwood, and, as she spoke, Claire cast a half-frightened glance in the direction of the house. She knew that Sir Adrian was closeted with his lawyer, and that he was, therefore, not in the least likely to emerge from the obscurity of his study for some time to come. But as long as he was anywhere on the place, she was totally unable to rid herself of the hateful consciousness of his presence.

He reminded her of some horrible and loathsome species of spider, at times remote and motionless in the centre of his web—that web in which, body and soul, she had been inextricably caught—but always liable to wake into sudden activity, and then pounce mercilessly.

“Oh, I hope not!” she repeated, shivering a little. “If she only knew what marriage to the wrong man means!... And I’m certain Geoffrey is the wrong man. Why on earth does Blaise behave like this?”—impatiently. “Anyone might think—Jean herself might think—he didn’t care! And I’m positive he does.”

“If he does, he’s a fool. Good Lord!”—moodily kicking a pebble out of his path—“imagine any sane man, with a clear road before him, not taking it!!” He swung round towards her suddenly. “Claire, if there were only a clear road—for us! If only I could take you away from all this!” his glance embracing the grey old house, so beautiful and yet so much a prison, which just showed above the tops of the tall-growing rhododendrons.

“Oh, hush! Hush!”

Claire glanced round her affrightedly, as though the very leaves and blossoms had ears to hear and tongues to repeat.

“One never knows”—she whispered the words barely above her breath—“where he is. He might easily be hidden in one of the alleys that run parallel with this.”

“The skunk!” muttered Nick wrathfully.

“What’s that?”

Claire drew suddenly closer to him, her face blanching. A sound—the light crunching of gravel beneath a footstep—had come to her strained ears.

“Nick! Did you hear?” she breathed.

A look of keen anxiety overspread his face. For himself, he did not care; Adrian Latimer could not hurt him. But Claire—his “golden narcissus”—what might he not inflict on her as punishment if he discovered them together?

The next moment it was all he could do to repress a shout of relief. The steps had quickened, rounded the corner of the alley, and revealed—Jean.

“We’re mighty glad to see you,” remarked Nick, as she joined them. “We thought you were—the devil himself”—with a grin.

“Oh, he’s safe for half an hour yet,” Jean reassured them, “I asked Tucker”—the Latimer’s butler, who worshipped the ground Claire walked on—“and his solicitor is still with him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked looking for you”—smiling. “I knew Nick was over here, and Sir Adrian might have followed me.”

“You’re sure he hasn’t?” asked Claire nervously. “He is so cunning—so stealthy.”

“Even if he had, you’re doing nothing wrong,” maintained Jean stoutly.

“Everything I do is wrong—in his eyes,” returned Claire bitterly. “That’s what makes the misery of it. If I were really wicked, really unfaithful, I should feel I deserved anything I got. But it’s enough if I’m just happy for a few minutes with a friend for him to want to punish me, to—to suspect me of any evil. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t bear it any longer!”

She flung out her arms in a piteous gesture of abandonment. There was something infinitely touching and forlorn about her as she stood there, as though appealing against the hideous injustice of it all, and, with a little cry Jean caught her outstretched hands and drew her into her embrace, folding her closely in her warm young arms.

Nick had turned aside abruptly, his face rather white, his mouth working. His powerlessness to help the woman he loved half maddened him.

Meanwhile Jean was crooning little, inarticulate, caressing sounds above Claire’s bowed head, until at last the latter raised a rather white face from her shoulder and smiled the small, plucky smile with which she usually managed to confront outrageous fortune.

“Thank you so much,” she said with a glint of humour in her tones. “You’ve been dears, both of you. It’s awfully nice to—to let go, sometimes. But I’m quite all right again, now.”

“Then, if you are,” replied Jean cheerfully, “perhaps you can bear up against the shock of too much joy. We want you to have ‘a day out.’”

“‘A day out’?” repeated Claire. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re organising a picnic to Dartmoor, and we want to fix it so that you can come too. Didn’t you tell me that Sir Adrian was going to be away one day this week? Going away, and not returning till the next day?”

Claire nodded, her eyes dancing with excitement.

“Yes—oh, yes! He has to go up to London on business.”

“Then that’s the day we’ll choose. Heaven send it be fine!”—piously.

“Oh, how I’d love it!” exclaimed Claire. “I haven’t been on the Moor for such a long time.”

“And I’ve never been there at all,” supplemented Jean.

“Nick! Nick!” Claire turned to him excitedly. “Did you know of this plan? And why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

He looked at her, a slow smile curving his lips.

“Why, I never thought of it,” he admitted. “You see”—explanatorily—“when I’m with you, I can’t think of anything else.”

“Nick, I won’t have you making barefaced love to a married woman under my very nose,” protested Jean equably. And the shadow of tragedy that had lowered above them a few minutes earlier broke into a spray of cheery fun and banter.

“You seem very gay to-day.”

The cold, sneering tones fell suddenly across the gay exchange of jokes and laughter that ensued, and the trio looked up to see the tall, lean, black-clad figure of Sir Adrian standing at the end of the path, awaiting their approach.

To Jean, as to Claire, occurred the analogy of a malevolent spider on the watch. Even the man’s physical appearance seemed in some way to convey an unpleasant suggestion of resemblance—his long, thin, sharply-jointed arms and legs, his putty-coloured face, a livid mask lit only by a pair of snapping, venomous black eyes, half hidden between pouched lids that were hardly more than hanging folds of wrinkled akin, his long-lipped, predatory mouth with its slow, malicious smile. Jean repressed a little shudder of disgust as she responded to his sneering comment:

“We are—quite gay, Sir Adrian. It’s a fine day, for one thing, and the sun’s shining, and we’re young. What more do we want?”

“What more, indeed? Except”—bowing mockingly—“the beauty with which a good Providence has already endowed you. You are a lucky woman, Miss Peterson; your cup is full. My wife is not, perhaps”—regarding her appraisingly—“quite so beneficently dowered by Providence, so it remains for me to fill her cup up to the brim.”

He paused, and as the black, pin-point eyes beneath the flabby lids detected the slight stiffening of Claire’s slender figure, his long, thin lips widened into a sardonic smile.

“Yes, to the brim,” he repeated with satisfaction. “That’s a husband’s duty, isn’t it, Mr. Brennan?”—addressing Nick with startling suddenness.

“You should know better than I, Sir Adrian,” retorted Nick, “seeing that you have experience of matrimony, while I have none.”

“But you have hopes—aspirations, isn’t it so?” pursued Latimer suavely. There was an undercurrent of disagreeable suggestion in his tones.

Nick was acutely conscious that his keenest aspiration at the moment was to knock the creature down and jump on him.

“We must find you a wife, eh, Claire? Eh, Miss Peterson?” continued Sir Adrian, rubbing the palm of one bony hand slowly up and down over the back of the other. “I’m sure, Claire, you would like to see so—intimate—a friend as Mr. Brennan happily married, wouldn’t you?”

“I should like to see him happy,” answered Claire with tight lips.

“Just so—just so,” agreed her husband in a queer cackling tone as though inwardly amused. “Well, get him a wife, my dear. You are such friends that you should know precisely the type of woman which appeals to him.”

He nodded and turned to go, gliding away with an odd shuffling gait, and muttering to himself as he went: “Precisely the type—precisely.”

As he disappeared from view down one of the branching paths of the shrubbery, an odious little laugh, half chuckle, half snigger, came to the ears of the three listeners.

Claire’s face set itself in lines that made her look years older than her age.

“You’d better go,” she whispered unevenly. “We shan’t be able to talk any more now that he knows you are here. He’ll be hovering round—somewhere.”

Jean nodded.

“Yes, we’d better be going. Come along, Nick. And let us know, Claire”—dropping her voice—“as soon as you have found out for certain what day he goes away. You can telephone down to us, can’t you?”

“Yes. I’ll ring up when he’s out of the house some time,” she answered “Or send a message. Anyway, I’ll manage to let you know somehow. Oh!”—stretching out her arms ecstatically—“imagine a day, of utter freedom! A whole day!”