CHAPTER XXVI

That afternoon Saxonstowe arrived in town from Yorkshire with a grim determination in his heart to have it out once and for all with Sprats. He had tried to do his duty as a country squire and to interest himself in country life and matters: he had hunted the fox and shot pheasants, sat on the bench at petty and at quarter sessions, condoled with farmers on poor prices and with old women on bad legs, and he was still unsatisfied and restless and conscious of wanting something. The folk round about him came to the conclusion that he was not as other young men of his rank and wealth—he seemed inclined to bookishness, he was a bit shy and a little bit stand-offish in manner, and he did not appear to have much inclination for the society of neighbours in his own station of life. Before he succeeded to the title Saxonstowe had not been much known in the neighbourhood. He had sometimes visited his predecessor as a schoolboy, but the probability of his becoming the next Lord Saxonstowe was at that time small, and no one had taken much notice of Master Richard Feversham. When he came back to the place as lord and master, what reputation he had was of a sort that scarcely appealed to the country people. He had travelled in some fearsome countries where no other man had ever set foot, and he had written a great book about his adventures, and must therefore be a clever young man. But he was not a soldier, nor a sailor, and he did not particularly care for hunting or shooting, and was therefore somewhat of a hard nut to crack. The honest gentlemen who found fox-hunting the one thing worth living for could scarcely realise that even its undeniable excitements were somewhat tame to a man who had more than once taken part in a hunt in which he was the quarry, and they were disposed to{218} regard the new Viscount Saxonstowe as a bit of a prig, being unconscious that he was in reality a very simple-minded, unaffected young man who was a little bit embarrassed by his title and his wealth. As for their ladies, it was their decided opinion that a young peer of such ancient lineage and such great responsibilities should marry as soon as possible, and each believed that it was Lord Saxonstowe’s bounden duty to choose a wife from one of the old north-country families. In this Saxonstowe agreed with them. He desired a wife, and a wife from the north country, and he knew where to find her, and wanted her so much that it had long been evident to his sober judgment that, failing her, no other woman would ever call him husband. The more he was left alone, the more deeply he sank in the sea of love. And at last he felt that life was too short to be trifled with, and he went back to Sprats and asked her firmly and insistently to marry him.

Sprats was neither hurt nor displeased nor surprised. She listened silently to all he had to say, and she looked at him with her usual frankness when he had finished.

‘I thought we were not to talk of these matters?’ she said. ‘We were to be friends—was there not some sort of compact?’

‘If so, I have broken it,’ he answered—‘not the friendship—that, never!—but the compact. Besides, I don’t remember anything about that. As to talking of this, well, I intend to go on asking you to marry me until you do.’

‘You have not forgotten what I told you?’ she said, eyeing him with some curiosity.

‘Not at all. I have thought a lot about it,’ he answered. ‘I have not only thought, but I have come to a conclusion.’

‘Yes?’ she said, still curious. ‘What conclusion?’

‘That you are deceiving yourself,’ he answered. ‘You think you love Lucian Damerel. I do not doubt that you do, in a certain way, but not in the way in which I would wish you, for instance, to love me, and{219} in which I believe you could and would love me—if you would let yourself.’

Sprats stared at him with growing curiosity and surprise. There was something masterful and lordly about his tone and speech that filled her heart with a great sense of contentment—it was the voice of the superior animal calling to the inferior, of the stronger to the weaker. And she was so strong that she had a great longing to be weak—always providing that something stronger than herself were shielding her weakness.

‘Well?’ was all she could say.

‘You have always felt a sense of protection for him,’ continued Saxonstowe. ‘It was in you from the first—you wanted something to take care of. But isn’t there sometimes a feeling within you that you’d like to be taken care of yourself?’

‘Who taught you all this?’ she asked, with puzzled brows. ‘You seem to have acquired some strange knowledge of late.’

‘I expect it’s instinct, or nature, or something,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, have I spoken the truth?’

‘You don’t expect me to confess the truth to you, do you?’ she answered. ‘You have not yet learned everything, I see.’ She paused and regarded him for some time in silence. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said at last, ‘but this seems as if it were the prelude to a fight. I feel as I used to feel when I fought with Lucian—there was always a lot of talk before the tearing and rending began. I feel talky now, and I also feel that I must fight you. To begin with, just remember that I am a woman and you’re a man. I don’t know anything about men—they’re incomprehensible to me. To begin with, why do you wish to marry me?—you’re the first man who ever did. I want to know why—why—why?’

‘Because you’re the woman for me and I’m the man for you,’ he replied masterfully. ‘You are my mate.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I feel it.’

‘Then why don’t I feel it?’ she asked quickly.{220}

‘Are you dead certain you don’t?’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I think, perhaps, that if you could just get deep down into yourself, you do.’

‘But that doesn’t explain why you want to marry me,’ she said inconsequently. ‘You tell me that what I have always felt for Lucian is not what I ought to feel for the man I love. Well, if I analyse what I feel for Lucian, perhaps it is what you say it is—a sense of protection, of wanting to help, and to shield; but then, you say that that is the sort of love you have for me.’

‘Did I?’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘You forget that I have not yet told you what sort of love I have for you—we have not reached the love-making stage yet.’

Sprats felt femininity assert itself. She knew that she blushed, and she felt very hot and very uncomfortable, and she wished Saxonstowe would not smile. She was as much a girl and just as shy of a possible lover as in her tom-boy days, and there was something in Saxonstowe’s presence which aroused new tides of feeling in her. He had become bold and masterful; it was as if she were being forced out of herself. And then he suddenly did a thing which sent all the blood to her heart with a wild rush before it leapt back pulsing and throbbing through her body. Saxonstowe spoke her name.

‘Millicent!’ he said, and laid his hand very gently on hers. ‘Millicent!’

She drew away from him quickly, but her eyes met his with courage.

‘My name!’ she said. ‘No one ever called me by my name before. I had half forgotten it.’

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want you to think all this over, like the woman you are. Don’t waste your life on a dream or a delusion. Come to me and be my wife and friend so long as God lets us live. You are a true woman—a woman in a thousand. I would not ask you else. I will be a true man to you. And you and I together can do great things, for others. Think, and tell me your thoughts—afterwards.’{221}

‘Yes, afterwards,’ she said. She wanted him to go, and he saw it and went, and Sprats sat down to think. But for the first time in her life she found it impossible to think clearly. She tried to marshal facts and to place them before her in due sequence and proper order, but she discovered that she was pretty much like all other women at these junctures and that a strange confusion had taken possession of her. For the moment there was too much of Saxonstowe in her mental atmosphere to enable her to think, and after some time she uttered an impatient exclamation and went off to attend to her duties. For the remainder of the afternoon she bustled about the house, and the nursing-staff wondered what it was that had given their Head such a fit of vigorous research into unexplored corners. It was not until evening that she allowed herself to be alone again, and by that time she was prepared to sit down and face the situation. She went to her own room with a resolute determination to think of everything calmly and coolly, and there she found evening newspapers lying on the table, and she picked one up mechanically and opened it without the intention of reading it, and ere she knew what was happening she had read of the tragedy in Paris. The news stamped itself upon her at first without causing her smart or pain, even as a clean shot passes through the flesh with little tearing of the fibres. She sat down and read all that the telegrams had to tell, and searched each of the newspapers until she was in possession of the latest news.

She had gone into her room with the influence of Saxonstowe’s love-making still heavy upon her womanhood; she left it an unsexed thing of action and forceful determination. In a few moments she had seen her senior nurse and had given her certain orders; in a few more she was in her outdoor cloak and bonnet and at the door, and a maid was whistling for a hansom for her. But just as she was running down the steps to enter it, another came hurriedly into the square, and Saxonstowe waved his hand to her. She paused and went{222} back to the open door; he jumped from his cab and joined her, and they went into the house together, and into the room which she had just left.

‘I was going to you’ she said, ‘and yet I might have known that you would come to me.’

‘I came as soon as I knew,’ he answered.

She looked at him narrowly: he was watching her with inquiring eyes.

‘We must go there at once,’ she said. ‘There is time to catch the night train?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘plenty of time. I have already made some arrangements—I thought you would wish it.’

She nodded in answer to this, and began to take some things out of a desk. Saxonstowe noticed that her hand was perfectly steady, though her face was very pale. She turned presently from packing a small handbag and came up to him.

‘Listen,’ she said; ‘it is you and I who are going—you understand?’

He looked at her for a moment in silence, and then bowed his head. He had not understood, but he felt that she had come to some determination, and that that was no time to question her. In a few moments more they had left the house and set out on their journey to Paris.