Part 4

"I shall take nothing for granted. But you see, Julian, I can't take life quite as you do--quite as callously, as cynically. There is a big responsibility for those of us who see a little--ah, such a very little way it is--further into the heart of things. We can only hope, and give, and spend ourselves--and judge no man."

Julian, who disliked being touched, moved his arm out of reach, and replied to these humanitarian sentiments unsympathetically.

"Your remarks have not the slightest bearing upon the case, Edna."

He thought to himself bitterly, not for the first time, that a stronger man would reject the weapons of obvious, meaningless satire, but nervous irritability again and again drove him to seek an outlet in words that he despised.

In silence, he entered the College with Edna, and let her proceed to the Supervisor's room, aware that he had purposely timed their arrival for an hour when Fairfax Fuller would be engaged in one of the classrooms. Few things discomposed Mr. Fuller more than a feminine intrusion which could not be accounted for by a question of business.

"He will be disappointed," seriously said Edna, turning away from the empty room. "But we shall have other talks. I don't despair yet of getting Fuller to Culmhayes, for all his misogyny." It was a principle with Lady Rossiter, her husband knew, never to allow their differences to degenerate into an offended silence when they were alone.

He sometimes thought that he could have borne it all better had she been a woman to make scenes, and to oppose him with tears or temper, instead of with that considered, brightly-unconscious, eternal loving-kindness.

They found Miss Marchrose in her own room, at work on the typewriter. She wore a long blue pinafore, and Julian noticed with an odd satisfaction that this was one of the days when her variable face showed colour and unmistakable beauty.

"Good afternoon," said Julian. "I hope we are not too early. My wife--Miss Marchrose."

Lady Rossiter, shaking hands, revealed her rather large white teeth in a smile, but Miss Marchrose, after her fashion, remained calmly serious.

"Won't you sit down?"

Lady Rossiter glanced slowly round the room.

It was a large light office, the window thrown open and looking on to the square paved court at the back of the house; the furniture scanty and of the most utilitarian description.

Miss Marchrose's writing-table was orderly, although papers were stacked upon it in wicker trays. A telephone with a glass mouthpiece stood at one corner and an electric reading-lamp at the other.

The typewriter had a very small table to itself, and a high chair with a small cushion placed in front of it. Except for three or four chairs and a strip of carpet, there was no other furniture in the room.

"I've not seen this room furnished before," Edna Rossiter observed. "You've hardly had time for the finishing touches yet, though, have you?"

Her tone was that of assertion, not of enquiry, but Miss Marchrose replied as though to a question.

"I'm afraid there isn't anything more to come. Mr. Fuller has kindly let me have everything I want."

"Even to a glass mouthpiece for the telephone?" enquired Edna smoothly.

A similar adornment distinguished her own telephone in the boudoir at Culmhayes, and Julian knew that his wife frequently drew attention to it by apologies for her own fastidiousness.

"That was brought by Mr. Easter. I used to dislike the old one so much, and he found it out, and very kindly gave me that."

"I shall talk to Mr. Easter about infringing my patent," laughed Edna. She turned to her husband.

"Mark must have seen the glass one in my boudoir, of course."

Julian was perfectly aware of the instinct which had prompted his wife to make use, in addressing herself to him, of Mark Easter's first name.

He smiled rather grimly.

"I think you must have some flowers in here," Edna said to Miss Marchrose. "It does make all the difference, doesn't it, when one is chained to a desk all day?"

"But I'm not chained to a desk," said Miss Marchrose tranquilly. "I take two or three classes, and I'm very often in Mr. Fuller's room. Besides, I don't like flowers in an office; do you?"

"Ah, well," said Edna, in a voice the measured graciousness of which contrasted with the Superintendent's matter-of-fact utterance, "flowers mean rather a lot to me. I'm not happy unless I have a great many all round me.... But I know many people simply look on flowers as flowers, of course. Tell me, do you care for out-of-doors?"

Miss Marchrose looked unintelligent.

"Because I have some little nature-classes, as we call them, for looking into the heart of our West Country rather more closely. One week I take my little band down to the sea, another time up to the woods, sometimes just to study the wonderful colour in a Devonshire lane. I can't help thinking you might find a great deal to admire round Duckpool Farm. Isn't that where you're staying?"

"Yes. I hope you're going to let me give you some tea, Lady Rossiter."

"Presently, but you mustn't let us put you out. Don't alter anything--I love taking things just as I find them.... But tell me why you went to the farm; I thought it rather wonderful of you to strike out such a new line, instead of going to rooms in Church Street or St. Mary-Welcome's, as they all do."

"There are no rooms vacant in Church Street, I believe," said Miss Marchrose, very curtly indeed.

Julian felt convinced that she wished the implication made that had rooms been available she would have selected them, and equally certain that the implication would have been untrue.

"Is Easter here to-day?" he enquired abruptly.

"Yes; I'll let him know you've come. He generally has tea in here, and so does Mr. Fuller."

She went to the telephone.

"You mustn't let us interrupt your work if there's anything you want to finish before tea," Edna told her. "I know what it means to all of you to get through by six o'clock sharp, especially in these late summer evenings when it's already getting dark early. It must be too cruel to be robbed of even a few moments of fresh air and liberty."

Julian remembered Mark's eulogies.

"What time do you leave the College, I wonder?" he asked her, smiling slightly.

"It depends on the work. There's been a good deal of correspondence lately and I've stayed late to finish it up. If I may, there is just something I want to finish here."

She laid her hand on the typewriter.

"Please do."

Without further apology, Miss Marchrose sat down to her machine and completed the sheet upon which she had been engaged. As she drew it off the roller, Mark Easter came in.

She looked up with a sort of pleasure in her glance, and handed him a thin pile of foolscap sheets.

"Five copies," she said.

Mark glanced at the papers.

"I'm so grateful!" he exclaimed. "That's exactly what I wanted. Do you know what that is, Sir Julian?"

"What?"

"Estate business," laughed Mark. "Miss Marchrose is good enough to help me through with some of it, as she _only_ works ten hours a day here."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for letting her do it."

"Well," said Miss Marchrose gaily, "he boils my kettle for me."

Mark had placed the big kettle on the gas-ring and cleared the table of the heavy typewriter.

He was in his usual excellent spirits, and made indifferent jokes at which Miss Marchrose laughed with an absence of constraint such as Julian had not seen in her before. It was evident that Mark's gift for making friends had not failed him, any more than his magical capacity for diffusing contentment throughout his surroundings.

Contentment, however, stopped short at Lady Rossiter, as it was always apt to do when the focus of general attention was diverted to an object which she considered unworthy.

"Isn't Mr. Fuller coming in to tea?" She quietly interrupted Mark's exchange of chaffing allusions with Miss Marchrose.

"He generally comes. I'll go and dig him out," Mark volunteered.

"Your presence has frightened him away, Edna," said her husband, not without malice. "Fuller is a shy bird."

Edna smiled serenely.

"Poor Mr. Fuller, he and I are great friends."

It might be doubted whether Lady Rossiter found cause for thankfulness in the presence of her great friend when he eventually joined the tea-party, his face black with scowls at the interruption to his work and suffused with shyness at her complacent greeting.

Miss Marchrose poured out tea and talked to Julian, who sat next her, and Mark, to whom self-consciousness was unknown, handed plates of bread-and-butter and cut up a small plum-cake and endeavoured to win smiles from the recalcitrant Fuller. Edna, her voice modulated to careful sweetness, manufactured kindly conversation.

But Mr. Fuller, his elbows very much squared and his bullet head thrust well forward, devoted his energies to the rapid demolition of his meal, and replied monosyllabically to Mark's kindly derision and Lady Rossiter's benevolences alike. His shyness, however, appeared to place him under a mysterious compulsion to recite aloud, in an inward voice, any scrap of printed matter upon which his eye chanced to fall, regardless of relevance. This necessity, though common enough in any assembly of not too congenial strangers, did not add to continuity of discourse.

As thus, when Lady Rossiter moved a pot of plum jam towards him, saying that she was so sorry that the injunction to make _no_ difference had not been attended to, Mr. Fuller was constrained to reply in a very severe way, No; he never ate jam--Three gold medals at the Paris and Vienna Exhibitions--but it was there every day, he believed.

"It is there, because _I_ like it," said Miss Marchrose. "They never had anything but bread-and-butter till I came."

Edna's ever-ready eyebrows went up, but she still addressed herself exclusively to Fairfax Fuller.

"Plum jam is quite my favourite. I never really care for the expensive varieties, or think them a _bit_ better than the others."

"Inspection invited at the manufactories." Fuller pursued his way, almost turning the jam-pot upside down in an apparently agonised search for further literature.

"Jam on bread-and-butter is quite a luxury. Julian and I never get it at home," Lady Rossiter persevered.

"London, Edinburgh, _and_ at Sharplington in Essex," said Fuller, without looking at her.

"Have you ever been over one of those big factories? It would be rather interesting," Mark said, in a charitable endeavour to introduce some element of continuity into the conversation. Lady Rossiter at once seconded the attempt.

"I've always so wished to have an opportunity of that sort. I should like to know just how the poor factory hands live, and what the conditions of work really are in those great places."

"I don't suppose that Sharplington in Essex is on the same scale as London or Edinburgh," Mark suggested.

At which interesting initial stage of an interchange of views, Mr. Fuller suddenly disconcerted everybody by looking straight across the table at the almanack which hung upon the wall, and declaring with a sort of suppressed violence:

"Five thousand souls gained last year alone--The Church Mission Society."

Edna's pale skin absolutely flushed and she set her lips. Mark hastily bent down to pick up an imaginary handkerchief, and Miss Marchrose laughed.

"That's settled it," thought Julian. "Edna will never forgive her that laugh."

He saw no reason to reverse the judgment while his wife took her cool, kindly farewell of the Lady Superintendent.

"You must come out to Culmhayes one day. Of course, I know Saturday afternoons and Sundays are your only free times, so I never issue workday invitations. But I'm always so glad to see any of you, and you can just rest and do anything you please, and not feel obliged to make conversation."

Julian watched the recipient of these attentions rather curiously.

She withdrew her hand from Lady Rossiter's kind, enveloping clasp and put it into the pocket of her pinafore very deliberately.

"On Saturdays I'm going to the estate office with you, I hope. Didn't we arrange that?" she asked Mark Easter.

"If you have nothing better to do, I should be most grateful. Everything is in confusion there, since my clerk had to leave on account of sudden illness."

"I shall like it very much," said Miss Marchrose, with a very charming smile, and still addressing herself exclusively to Mark. "And I've nothing better to do at all, thank you."

Julian, while inwardly applauding her, wondered whether she had herself been entirely aware of the full efficiency of the oblique retaliation.

On the whole, he thought that she had.

V

As Julian pursued his acquaintance with Miss Marchrose--and he was by no means minded to let it drop--he came more and more to the conclusion that she had been quite as conscious as himself of the mutual antagonism which Edna and she had roused in one another on the rather disastrous occasion of their meeting.

She neither came over to Culmhayes nor showed any disposition to join Lady Rossiter's cherished nature-classes, the final sessions of which were drawing near with the approach of the colder weather.

Julian saw her at the College, where she worked hard and successfully, and once or twice at his own estate office, where she frequently replaced Mark Easter's absent clerk.

"I don't know that we ought to let you spend so much time here, though it is quite invaluable to the business," he once said to her.

To which Miss Marchrose returned very candidly that it was always the greatest possible pleasure to her to do anything for Mr. Easter.

Julian quite believed it.

The friendship established between her and Mark was founded on excellent good comradeship, a mutual respect for one another's power of work, and the very admirable sense of humour possessed by each.

Julian, watching the frank gaiety of her manner as she came to accept him in the light of Mark's friend instead of merely as a director of the College, found himself wondering from time to time if Miss Marchrose, sharp-tongued and quick-witted, apt at satire even at her gentlest, could by any possibility ever have been the heroine where Captain Clarence Isbister, youthful, sporting, and essentially British, had once been the hero. His wife appeared inclined to let the question rest, and Julian had no desire to remind her of it; but for the satisfaction of his own curiosity, he told himself, he would have liked to establish the proof or otherwise of Fuller's verdict to which he was only half inclined to subscribe--"hard as nails."

It was Edna, however, who returned to the charge of Miss Marchrose's identity.

"I might have known it," her husband reflected.

He heard with his accustomed phlegm of manner, that Edna, conducting the nature-class through a certain small wood just off the Rossiter estate, in order to introduce it to a sunset effect visible through the beech-trees, had met with an interruption before anyone had had time to do more than ejaculate a preliminary "Wonderful!"

"They are apt to be a shade blatant, poor dears! and talk about the sun looking like a ball of fire in the sky and that sort of thing."

"You could scarcely ask for a more accurate description, after all," murmured Julian.

"But what one's there for, of course, is to get them to see a little deeper, a little more into the heart of Nature's beauty and wonderful, wonderful tenderness. I wanted to show them the glint of red on the stems of those trees, and the miracle of _hush_ that comes over the world just as the sun goes down...."

Lady Rossiter paused, absorbed in the regretful retrospect of the showman whose curtain has accidentally come down with a run in the midst of his star performer's best turn.

"Well, what happened? Did the sun refuse to go down after all?" was Julian's rather ribald interruption to her thoughts.

"The sun was in the most exquisite blaze of red and gold, and one could only hold one's breath in awe at the most wonderful pageant the world can show, when that Marchrose woman from Culmouth College came crashing through the undergrowth, ringing a bicycle-bell, and with her back--actually, _her back_--to that sunset!"

"What did you do?" asked Julian, with considerable interest.

Lady Rossiter made the strangely contradictory statement that her sex, when describing the character of a crisis, so frequently appears compelled to proffer.

"I didn't say one word, Julian. I felt that I simply couldn't have spoken. I couldn't help holding up my hand and saying very quietly indeed: 'Ah, hush! Can't you feel that it _hurts_, somehow, to disturb such a moment as this?' It was such hideous profanity, Julian!"

"Did you tell her so?"

"I could never say anything that would deliberately hurt another," Lady Rossiter made grave reply. "But I laid my hand on that terrible bicycle, and the girl had to keep still for a minute or two."

"Was she angry?"

"I hope I sent out some calming, loving thoughts, for the whole evening was terribly jarred, one could feel it. Poor foolish, defiant creature! I could see her hands shaking, as she tried to take her machine from me. I couldn't let her go like that, of course, and I tried to say a little something, very quietly, about the glory of God's own evening light all round us. But she kept her back to the sunset all the time.

"And, Julian, to my dismay and astonishment, she was not alone. Mark was with her."

"Why shouldn't he be?"

"Have you forgotten my poor Clarence so soon?" reproachfully enquired Lady Rossiter, whose cousinly affection for her poor Clarence appeared to increase by leaps and bounds in proportion to the growth of her disesteem for Miss Marchrose.

"Clarence has nothing to do with it. The circumstances are entirely dissimilar."

"We can't tell that in the case of a woman whom I _must_, much as I dislike uttering any shadow of condemnation, call utterly heartless. Shall I ever forget what that hospital nurse told me of poor Clarence's state of mind after that heartless betrayal----"

"In any circumstances, Edna, Mark isn't in the least likely to knock his head against the walls of the cottage, and if he does, they will very probably fall about his ears. I wish he would attend to his own house, before doing up the tenants'! Those children have nearly broken down the whole of the garden palings. But go on--did you achieve any _rapprochement_ between Mark and the sunset, or was he also ringing bicycle-bells and turning his back on it?"

"Mark made some foolish explanation about seeing the girl back to Duckpool Farm, but they were evidently walking, and pushing the bicycle between them."

"I don't see how they could do anything else, if there was only one bicycle," said Julian, idly desirous of making more obvious a want of sympathy that was already perfectly well _en evidence_.

"You may not understand it, Julian, but Mark is very dear to me. To you he may be merely a good fellow, and an excellent estate agent, but to me he has been something more ever since that ghastly tragedy of his wife. I gave him all the help that a woman could give, then, and I can't ever forget it. I can't let Mark break his heart a second time. Not that she's attractive, or even pretty," said Edna, distinctly divided between her determination to exploit Mark Easter's peril and her reluctance to allow to Miss Marchrose any of the usual advantages attributed to a charmer of men....

"I know no one less likely than Mark Easter to make a fool of himself in that particular way," said Julian emphatically.

"It's not Mark that I'm afraid of," inconsistently said Lady Rossiter. "A friendship with a good, true woman is often a man's best safeguard."

Julian wondered whether it would be worth while to simulate a belief that the good, true woman in question was Miss Marchrose, but Edna left him no time to adopt this amiable pose.

"I am going to find out once and for all whether that girl--I suppose she calls herself a girl--is really poor Clarence's evil genius or not. Personally, I believe she is."

Julian left it at that, not desirous of sparing his wife the trouble of her proposed investigation by telling her Miss Marchrose's identity without more ado.

Making his own observations, he thought Mark in no danger of falling a victim to the _beaux yeux_ which, if their smile was chiefly kept for answering his, were far more often bent upon a typewriter or an account-book than diverted towards him. Fuller continued to extol the Lady Superintendent, and Sir Julian went oftener to the College than usual, not concealing from himself that he found the enigma of her personality of interest.

She continued gaily impersonal towards him until one evening in October, when he overtook her at the door of the College, and on an impulse born of unacknowledged, overwhelming loneliness, suddenly asked her if she would care to drive down to the shore with him and go on to the farm afterwards.

He had long ago decided that Miss Marchrose, although her manner was often abrupt, was devoid of shyness as of conventional politeness. If his suggestion displeased her, she would undoubtedly decline it.

But she exclaimed with undisguised pleasure, and took her place in the car beside him.

Julian was more than usually dissatisfied with life, and made no attempt at conversation. It struck upon him with relief that Miss Marchrose was equally silent, and presently he glanced at her.

She was leaning back, her hair blown from her temples by the soft, salt-laden breeze, and she looked neither young nor pretty in the waning light, but exceedingly weary.

"Do you like your work?" Julian enquired with extreme abruptness, and a sudden, genuine desire for information.

"At the College? Very much indeed."

Her tone was guarded, he felt.

"I mean the whole thing. What made you take up this sort of thing? Tell me about it."

He almost heard her hesitate before she answered with careful lightness:

"Oh, I had to do something, and I should dislike teaching children--and do it very badly. I trained as a shorthand-typist, and am really qualified for a secretary. I rather like doing shorthand."

The acuteness of his disappointment actually surprised Sir Julian. He realised that he had made the most tentative of efforts to get into touch with one whom he vaguely thought of as a kindred spirit, and that he had been lightly and unmistakably rebuffed. He kept silence, making a pretence of absorption in his driving.

Unexpectedly, Miss Marchrose made a sort of inarticulate sound of interrogation.

"Sir Julian?"

He turned his head.

"I'm sorry," she said gently. "You really wanted to know, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"After I'd said that, I--I thought you were disappointed."

"You are very quick to detect an atmosphere."

"I'm sorry," she said again. "Sometimes I don't realise when the platitudes that one keeps as stock answers to enquiries are unnecessary."

"Thank you," said Julian.