CHAPTER XV THE SERMON ON FORGIVENESS

Half-an-hour later the three Furlongers sat down to a cold breakfast. They were almost silent, for there was nothing more to be said. The matter was settled. Nigel had found an unexpected ally in Janet, and had carried his point. Directly after breakfast he wrote to von Gleichroeder. It was a difficult letter, for it meant nothing less than eating humble pie, but for that very reason he did not take long over it. An envelope addressed in his large, scrawling hand was soon ready to be posted.

It was a clear, cold day, this feast of Stephen. A frosty sunshine crisped the grass, scattering the damps of yesterday's fog. The lane smelled of frost as Nigel walked up it to the post-office. But he did not see it as it was—in the duress and beggarliness of winter; he saw it as it would be, bursting with spring, full of scent and softness and song. He pictured those naked bushes when spring had clothed them, those grey banks when spring had fired them—the hedges were full of future song, the hollows of primroses to be.

He posted his letter, then stood for a moment, looking southward. The sunshine was so clear that the rims of distant windows gleamed with white across the fields. He could see the windows of Shovelstrode....

[Pg 174]

Dared he?

After all, he would have to. He could not leave Sparrow Hall without seeing Tony. He would not tell her of her place in his plans, but he owed it to her and to himself that she should think of him as a man living uprightly, striving after honour. Now she was thinking of him as a scoundrel and an outcast—he came into her thoughts with a shudder. It must not be.

At the same time he was afraid. It gave him a strange, cold qualm to think he was afraid of Tony, once his comrade, now his love—but he was. If he meant to see her, he must go at once, before his resolve lost strength with spontaneity. He turned towards the south, where the sunshine lay.

As he came near Shovelstrode his quakings grew. After all, by the time he had made himself worthy to think of her, she would have given herself to another. He could not even hint that he wanted her to wait. He must trust to her aloofness to keep her free, and the memory of their friendship to keep alive in her heart a little spark that he could some day fan into flame. But it was all rather hopeless, a leap in the dark.

Perhaps, even, she would refuse to see him. He remembered the look in her eyes when she had turned from him by Goatsluck Farm. All the steel-cold virtue, all the ignorant horror, all the cruelty of youth had been in that look. Perhaps she had turned from him for ever. Perhaps nothing that he could ever achieve or be would wipe out from her memory his foul betrayal of others and herself.

[Pg 175]

But he went too far in his fears for utter despair. Reaction set in—hope began once more to lacerate him, and whipped him forward to make his last desperate appeal to the fates that had always hitherto been deaf and blind.

He hesitated a moment when he came to the house. The servants might know who he was and not allow him in, or he might be seen by some of the family. It struck him that he had better go and look for her in the park before risking himself on the doorstep. She had once told him that she often wandered among the pines.

He slipped round behind the lodge, and was skirting the lawn at the back of the house, when he saw one of the French windows open and a girl come out with her dog. His heart gave a suffocating leap, and something seemed to rise in his throat and stay there, making him gulp idiotically. He had never before felt any emotion at the sight of her—just pleasure, a calm, slow-moving comfort. But to-day his head swam, and he could hardly see her as she came running and skipping across the lawn in a manner wholly at variance with her long skirts and coiled-up hair.

She turned aside before she reached the bushes that hid him, and he just managed to call after her—

"Tony!—Tony!"

The dog barked, and the next minute had scented him, and came cantering over the grass. Tony stood still and listened. She looked uncertain, and he called again—

"Tony!"

[Pg 176]

She turned quickly, and slipped behind the bushes, running to him along the path. When she was a few yards off she stopped dead.

"Mr. Furlonger...."

She stood outlined against a patch of wintry sky. It was the first time that he had seen her since her return. He thought that she was paler than in the valiant days of their friendship, and certainly the way she did her hair gave her a grown-up look. The stifling sensation in his throat became worse, and he could not speak.

"What is it ... Mr. Furlonger?"

"I—I want to speak to you."

"Oh, no! I can't!" Her voice was quite childish.

"I must—please do."

She hesitated a moment.

"Then come into the shrubbery. We can be seen here from the house."

"I know. I'm not here to get you into trouble. I—I only came to say good-bye."

"Good-bye," she repeated vaguely, not quite understanding him, for her heart had said good-bye to him long ago.

"Yes—I'm going to London."

They were walking away from the house to where the pine-needles were thick under their feet—on a little, moist path smelling of winter. The sunshine came slanting down on Tony as she stopped, showing up her slim, strong figure in a cold purity of light. It rested on her hair, and he saw golden threads in it—in her eyes, and he saw golden sparks in them. For the first time he[Pg 177] realised how beautiful she was in all the assurance and unconsciousness of her youth. He longed to tell her so. Instead he muttered—

"How grown-up you look."

"Do I?—it's my hair, I suppose."

"Did they make you put it up?"

"Aunt Maggie said I was old enough—and I think so too."

"I hope you don't mind my coming here to see you." He was desperately embarrassed, and her manner did not reassure him. "I'm going away, you see, to study music, and I—I thought I should like to say good-bye."

"Oh, no," she said rather awkwardly, her excessive youth showing nowhere more clearly than in her inability to put him at his ease. "Oh, no, I'm glad you came—to say good-bye."

"I'm going to work very hard. There's a fellow—Eitel von Gleichroeder, I don't know if you've heard of him—who's taken a fancy to me, and says he'll coach me if I'll take up the violin professionally."

"I didn't know you played."

"Yes—but I'd no idea I was any good till I met this chap. He says I ought to make quite a decent thing out of it. I—I think it's worth trying."

"Oh, yes."

"You see," he continued, his voice shaking with emotion, "I want to start a new life—to be respectable, I suppose you'd call it. If I win fame as a violinist—and von Gleichroeder thinks I may—I—I shall have lived down everything."

"Yes ... of course."

[Pg 178]

It was embarrassment, not lack of interest, that made her replies so trite. Memories of their friendship—now dim and far-off, separated from her by many wonderful happenings—were creeping up to her and filling her with a vague uneasiness.

As for Nigel, he realised now what had taken place. He understood why his tongue had suddenly become tied in her presence, and his eagerness collapsed into shuffling uncouthness. He had come to Shovelstrode to speak to a little girl—and he had found a woman. Tony the schoolgirl, the hoyden, the gay comrade, was now nothing but a little ghost haunting the slopes of Ashdown and the secret lanes of Kent. In her place stood a woman—come suddenly, as the woman always comes—and the woman, he knew, was trying to call back the girl, and see things from her eyes once more—and could not.

"Tony—Miss Strife—I wanted to tell you this, just to show you I'm not always going to be a convict on ticket-of-leave."

"I'm sure you won't. I hope you'll become very famous."

The words passed her lips in jerks. Her memories of him carried something very like repulsion. The more she struggled to revisualise the comradeship of two months ago, the greater was her distaste and humiliation. The kindest attitude possible for her now was one of embarrassed shyness. At first she had tried to heal herself with her memories, but as soon as she had[Pg 179] worked back to them she found their sweet secrets all sicklied with bitterness and shame.

He looked steadfastly at her, and he saw what had happened.

"Tony—you don't want to know me any longer—you want to forget we ever were friends. There's no good denying it, for I can see it."

She stood motionless, her lips white, her hands clenched in front of her.

"It's true—I can see it," he repeated.

She did not speak. Her memories were calling very loud, and there were tears in the voices, softening the shame.

"You can't bear the thought of having once been my friend."

Tears were rising in her throat, and with her tears the little school-girl who had run away came back, and showed her face again before she went for ever.

"Oh, it's hurt me!" she cried. "You don't know how it's hurt me!"

"To know I was a bad 'un?" He grasped the shaking hand she thrust out before her.

"Yes—I can't bear to think...."

"But I've changed—I swear I have. I'm going to live a decent life; and you're going to help me—by just saying you believe I can."

She shuddered, and pulled her hand away.

"I tell you I've changed," he exclaimed bitterly; "won't you believe me?"

She was crying now.

"You don't understand ... you don't [Pg 180]understand ... what one feels about men like you."

He winced.

"You don't know what I felt ... when I heard...."

"Tony!" he cried, "you must forgive me."

"I do forgive you—it's not me you've hurt—but——"

"'But' you don't forgive me, and it is you I've hurt—that's what your 'but' means."

There was another silence, broken only by her muffled crying and the throbbing of the wind in the pine-tops. Nigel felt that his old life was struggling in its cerements to spring up and strangle the new life at its birth.

"I can't understand," sobbed the girl, "how you or any man could have done such a horrible thing. You've been merciless and cruel and grasping and unworthy—and you won my friendship by false pretences, by lies and shams—when all the time you knew that if I'd had any idea who you really were I wouldn't have let you come near me. Oh, it probably seems only a little thing to you, but it's dreadful for me to think I've given my friendship to a man who's been a—a cad."

His anger kindled, for her inexperience and ignorance no longer attracted him—they were now only fragments that remained of something he had worshipped.

"Then are you going to inquire into the history of every man you meet, in case any one else should 'win your friendship under false pretences'?[Pg 181] Most men have had a little shake up in their pasts."

"You don't call yours a little shake up, do you?"

The retort was obvious, and he flushed—but at the same time it gave him an unwonted courage.

"No, of course not. But you mustn't think it's been just as easy for me to keep straight as for you. Do you realise what being a man means?—it means to be tempted."

"Women are tempted."

He laughed.

"But not like men."

He saw the incredulousness of her eyes, and once more his rage flared up.

"You don't understand!" he cried, "you don't understand!"

Then it struck him that she would never understand, that she would go through life with her narrow ideas, acquired in a girls' school and nurtured in her home. All her divine womanly powers of sympathy and forgiveness would be strangled by her ignorance and her hard-and-fast rules based on inexperience. She was the only woman he knew of her class, but he knew the limitations of that class, and Tony would soon be bound by them like the others. Janey was so different—Janey realised what one felt like when one simply had to go on the bust, when one came beastly muckers. She scolded, but she understood. Tony did not scold, and she did not understand.

[Pg 182]

"I want you to understand," he said painfully.

"What?"

"About me—about other men."

"Why do you think I don't understand?"

"You don't!—you don't! You simply can't—and if you go on as you are, you never will. Oh, I wish you could! You're too good to be like—other women."

Something in his nervous, excited manner frightened her, and strange to say that faint thrill of fear removed the shame which had tarnished her attitude towards him that day. Once more she felt the subtle magic of his unusualness—the attraction of Mr. Smith.

"Tell me," she said in a low voice, "tell me about yourself."

He laughed a little.

"Oh, my story is just every man's. I've mucked it a bit worse, that's all. But the fight's pretty well as hard with all of us. Directly we're grown up, almost before, there are people going about whose paid business it is to tempt us. Tempting us, just when Nature has made it most difficult for us to resist, is the profession of thousands of human beings. We fall—we often fall—for if we didn't a powerful set would have empty pockets—so they see that we fall. And then we can't pick ourselves up, we sink deeper and deeper into the mud ... and some of us touch bottom."

He paused, but she did not speak. Her face was turned away.

"The horrible thing I did," he continued almost[Pg 183] roughly, "which, if you'd only believe me, I loathe as much as you do—I did only as the consequence of other things, not quite so bad, before it. If a woman like you had come along when I first fell—I was only nineteen—she might have pulled me up again. But she didn't come. Other women came, and they knocked me flatter. They couldn't forgive. Poor devils! I don't blame them—they'd a great deal to forgive. I went down—and down—till it became a sort of habit to lie there in the ditch. Then you came, and I—I wanted to get up."

She still looked away from him, but her head was bowed.

"Oh, Tony—won't you give me a hand?"

"How can I?"

"By just believing I can and will do better, and by saying that if I live a decent life, and pull my name out of the dirt, and make myself fit to know you, I may be your—friend. You've a right to punish me, but I ask you to put aside that right for—for pity's sake."

"I don't see why you want my forgiveness so much—why it means such a lot to you."

"It means the world to me. Oh, Tony—little pal that was—forgive me! Life's a hard, rotten, wretched thing, and if there was no one to forgive...."

"I'll try."

"Oh, please try! If you think, you'll come to understand things presently, even if you can't now. It's for your own sake as well as mine I ask it. Think how many a man who lies in the mud[Pg 184] wouldn't be there if only he had some woman to forgive him."

"I'll try——" she repeated falteringly.

"Then I've got what'll keep me going for the present. And, Tony, you'll believe that I can and will behave decently, and make myself worthy to be your—your friend?"

"Yes, I'll believe it."

"Thank you."

She was trembling from head to foot.

"Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye."

He took her hand, and longed to kiss it. But he was still humble and afraid, and let it fall.

"Tony—Tony—you will have to forgive me a great many things ... because I am so very hungry."