CHAPTER XXIX

THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS

"A whole white world of revival awaits May's whisper a while, Abides and exults in the bud as a soft hushed laugh in a smile. As a maid's mouth, laughing with love and subdued for the love's sake, May Shines, and withholds for a little the word she revives to say." --A. C. SWINBURNE.

For three weeks, Melicent came down to the cottage on Tuesday and stayed till Friday. The first twice Brenda had accompanied her; but Pater grumbled, and the third time she came alone.

She was growing bold. Brooke's behaviour never varied. He was courteous and easy, but never confidential. He would come down the lane with his dogs, whistling, and lean over the gate among the lilacs until Melicent appeared from the cottage door, and they went on to Lone Ash together. His first greeting always was:

"How are you? Good news of Burmester, I hope?"

He was in great social request, and dined out most nights, often hurrying away from the absorbing spectacle of the rising walls of his home to lunch with some neighbouring magnate.

During the third week, except for their morning chat together, she scarcely saw him at all until Friday afternoon.

The week had been wet and cold, and she had been tramping about in a mackintosh and gaiters; but to-day was brilliantly fine, and she was lunching _al fresco_, up at the works, being immensely interested in some fresh boring operations then in progress in connection with her beloved fish-pond. She was sitting upon a pile of dry planks, making a dessert of almonds and raisins, and deep in a book, when she saw the Captain drive up. He seldom brought the motor up to the works. He had his own cart now, and a fast cob; and a trim young groom to look after them.

He sprang out, came up to where she sat, and began asking eager questions about the boring. They talked shop for several minutes, he sitting among the planks a little below her perch, bare-headed, and with his gaze upon the long foundation-lines.

Then a short silence fell, while the exhilarating May air sang about them. Looking straight before him, he said unconcernedly:

"Came to see if you cared for a drive this afternoon. It's a jolly day, and I've got to go to Arnstock. Care to come?"

She hesitated. Why not? She had evicted Mrs. Grundy long ago, and on what other grounds could she refuse? Yet something within said, "Don't," so loudly as to drown the voice of calm reason.

"I think I'd better not. I'm waiting here to see them begin to lay the damp course. Thanks all the same."

He looked at his watch. Then turned to her with a gleam in his eye.

"They quit work in an hour, so that reason won't do. Don't you trust me?"

"I have no notion what you mean," said Melicent, instantly frozen.

"Well," he said, "of course I know you despise conventionalities or you would not be following your present profession. When a girl steps down into the arena and joins the wrestling, one takes it for granted that she doesn't mind what folks say. So, if you refuse to let me take you a drive, I have to conclude that your objection is personal, don't I?"

"Then you don't consider it possible that I really may not wish to take a drive this afternoon?"

"Seeing what the weather's been this week, and what it is to-day, and the way you've been sticking to work, I think it's unlikely," he said calmly. He rose. "Pity you won't come," he added. "They're enlarging Arnstock Churchyard, and they've unearthed the head of a Saxon cross." Melicent sprang involuntarily to her feet. He looked at her steadily. "Knot-work," he said firmly. "As clean-cut as if it had been carved last week. They have got several bits. Harland thinks they may find it all. That's what I'm going to see."

She laughed a little uneasily. "I don't believe I can resist that," she said.

"Come along then," he replied coolly, picking up her warm coat from the planks. "There's Alfred to play propriety, you know."

"I don't believe you've ever been to Arnstock," he said, as they bowled lightly along the firm high-road. "You do nothing but stick to work. It isn't good for you."

"I have been to tea with the Harlands, and I am going to dine there next week. I don't know what more you can suggest in the way of dissipation. I'm sorry if I am ridiculous about Lone Ash, but you must consider the fascination of it. My first house--my dream! To see it taking shape before my eyes!"

She gazed before her with eyes that saw visions, and Hubert looked at her.

"I feel great scruples about monopolising you so much," he remarked. "Ought not all your energies just now to be concentrated on your _trousseau_?"

He was in a position to see the full play of expression in the face she sought to avert He marked the instinctive repugnance, the effort at concealment, the cold annoyance.

"Lancelot understands that I must first do what I undertook to do," she said stiffly.

"Then I am actually postponing the wedding arrangements? This is serious. My only excuse must be that there was no one who had a prior claim when you pledged yourself to me."

For just one moment she misunderstood--for one second she was on the verge of self-betrayal. It was on her tongue to say: "I never pledged myself to you!" when she saw the trap laid for her. Was it intentional? Swiftly she flashed a look at him. No babe could have been more innocent in expression.

"My private concerns will never be allowed to clash with business arrangements," she said haughtily. "What man would postpone, or throw up good work, just because he was going to be married?"

"Marriage is a mere episode nowadays, isn't it?" he said. "Just a holiday experience. The English fashion of it wouldn't content me."

"Marriage is not a thing you can talk about in the abstract," she said irritably. "One marriage is not a bit like another. You can choose your own kind, I suppose."

"Can you?" he asked urgently, in the candid tones of one seeking useful information.

There was a shadow of emphasis on the pronoun. She made no reply, and he went on:

"People's circumstances are so different I can imagine that _you_ might face the idea of marriage as a mere interlude, because your life is so full, and holds so much else of love and fame and what not. Now in my case ... will you allow a lonely man the luxury of talking about himself for five minutes?"

"I am interested," said Melicent, quite politely.

"Well, you see, here am I, alone in the world. I can hardly remember my mother. I never had but one real friend--a man. I don't think I can remember a woman speaking one solitary kind word to me until I turned up in England with money. Now do you see, that friendless as I am, without human ties of kith or kin, what seems to you just a convenient arrangement, is to me the one possibility life offers? ... I wonder if you have ever thought what it must be to live altogether without intimacies, as I have done, for thirty years?"

There was a quiet, earnest simplicity in his voice which disarmed her. Suddenly she saw him in a new light. He was no longer the relentless pursuer, the man who hunted down a girl as his desired quarry. He was a lonely, heart-hungry fellow, who had been starving for kind words, thirsting for feminine sympathy. Seeing him in the light of what he had since become, she revolted from the memory of her own hardness. She had been the only English girl--the only creature with whom he felt affinity--in Slabbert's Poort. Among all the degradation and savagery of the place, he had stretched out appealing hands to the one woman who might have understood. And she had never given him one kind word! He said he could not remember one!

Without her own volition she felt her heart assailed with a rush of pity and tenderness wholly new in her self-centred, balanced experience. Without a word of reproach, with an almost bald simplicity, this man had opened the flood-gates of compassion. He had done more; made her ashamed of herself. She felt her face suffused with colour--she knew that her eyes swam with tears. The brilliant sun, facing them as they drove westward, almost blinded her. She felt she must say something; but the effect of his words had been so unexpected, so overwhelming, that she could not control her voice at once. At last, feeling that her lack of response must seem unkind, she faltered out:

"I--I am so sorry for you. I never guessed you were so--lonely!"

And to her rage and fury, her eyes over-brimmed and two tears--rare indeed with her--splashed down upon the rug that covered her knees.

Hubert made some kind of an inarticulate exclamation, and an abrupt movement, abruptly checked by the consciousness of the neatly apparelled back of Alfred, the groom, almost touching his own. He maintained complete silence for a long minute, then, bending towards Melicent:

"Were those tears for me?" he asked, very low.

She had hastily found her handkerchief.

"I--I think so. I can't quite explain; what you said recalled something else ... and I suppose I'm tired."

"Nevertheless," he replied, still below his breath, "I have had, at least for a moment, the sympathy of a woman. I shan't forget that. I hope you don't think I am in the habit of puling and drivelling about my lonely lot. I don't know what impelled me to sentiment, but I assure you it is all over now. See, there is Arnstock Church! We will have tea at the inn, and then the workmen will be gone home, and we can have the churchyard to ourselves."

They pulled up at a little low inn, covered with wisteria and honeysuckle. As he helped her down, she realised that her fear of him had suddenly disappeared.

Seated by a little table at an open window over-looking a quaint garden, she poured out tea for him, and enjoyed home-made bread, and honey from the row of hives which stood before the hawthorn hedge.

They talked easily and naturally, like two between whom a barrier has been swept away. Hubert told her of his search among his mother's papers, his discovery there of the name of his grandfather's native village, his coming to England, and his quest of what Lance called his ancestral acres.

Tea over, they proceeded to the churchyard, and spent a vivid half-hour with the fragments of the Saxon cross and its knot-work. Melicent was in a fever of eagerness to discover runes, but there were none. However, they found what was almost as good, a series of grotesques down the sides of the shaft.

The workmen had turned up almost all the pieces, and when Melicent suggested, in a moment of inspiration, that the Captain should pay for its restoration and erection in the churchyard, by way of inaugurating his reign at Clunbury, he took up the idea with avidity.

They drove back almost in silence; but a silence so full for both, that they hardly realised their lack of words.

At the lilac-decked cottage gate, Hubert jumped out, and as usual held his hands to help her down. She had just drawn off her leather gloves, and there seemed something significant and wonderful in the warm contact of their bare hands. The light was not good. That, or something else, caused her foot to slip on the high step.

For just one moment she felt an instinctive tightening of his grasp, and one arm went round her so swiftly that all danger of a fall was over before recognised. She was set on the ground ... she felt dizzy, and almost staggered when released. For in that arresting instant, his mouth had been close to her ear, and she thought a sentence came to her--that he said, so low that she could scarcely hear:

"_Hadn't you better give in?_"

She had regained her poise, drawn herself away, her eyes shot a bewildered glance at him in the twilight. He did not look at her, but seemed in a tremendous hurry to be off. He had jumped back into the cart and was spinning down the lane before she had time to draw breath, or to ask herself if he had really said what she thought she heard.

She stood there, listening to the brisk beat of the horse's hoofs on the dry road, for quite a long time. Not a twig stirred in a stillness which seemed almost portentous. The dampness and fragrance of earth and growing things rose about her like incense. In a thicket not far distant, a nightingale began to bubble and gurgle into song.

Had he said it? If so, what did he mean? To what was she to give in? To the influence which that afternoon had softened, and as it were, dilated her heart? To the new kindness which she felt for him?

It must be illusion. Would he have asked a question of the kind and ridden away without an answer? Was it an inner voice that had spoken? If so, what was the purport?

Anger and self-will awoke. Her understanding, her emotions, her will were and should remain in her own keeping. What was the sensation she had experienced a moment ago, with his arms about her? She felt herself blush scarlet in the darkness.

* * * * * * * *

Next morning she went back to London.