The Magpies Nest (17 page)

"Where have you been?" she demanded absurdly.

"You—you... Oh, I was distracted! But I've found you."

"I'm going away," said Hope determinedly, bracing her shoulders with an air of one refusing discussion.

"You're going back on the next train," announced Mary. "I'll see to that."

"Oh, Mary, please don't bother me," said Hope, with an unexpected pleading note. "I'll go mad if ever I have to see that town again. I
want
to go."

"Now, see here," began Mary, vehemence overcoming clarity of speech, as she dragged Hope off toward a wooden bench out of the swirl of traffic. People were elbowing them politely; a few stared for a moment in passing.

"But I must catch the train."

"Wait, wait a minute!" She sought for a tactful beginning, and then flung herself at the heart of the matter; there was no time for tact. "You're going on to meet Edgerton, aren't you?" Hope merely looked at her, like an obstinate child which will not say it is sorry. "Well, what has he ever done to you?"

"I like him," said Hope, which again was not what Mary expected.

"Very well, you like him! And you're going to make him miserable the rest of his life to prove it!" Trusting to blind feeling, Mary knew it was useless to ask Hope to consider prudence and her own side of the case. "What'll he do with you? What will you do with him? You've got what he wants, but you can't give it to him. He'd give you what you want, but he hasn't got it. His life is made for him; he has made it himself; you'll be taking him away from everything he's used to. He isn't your age; he'll get tired of everlastingly 'yearning beyond the skyline, where the strange ships go down.' He'll want his work, and the men he knows. He hasn't your tastes; he'll be bored. After awhile he'll see you growing up, and away from him. And you'll be no nearer anything else. You'll always be on the outer edge of things, outside of the game; you won't have conformed to the rules. And by and by you'll leave him, find yourself—and he'll be sorry all his life." She paused for breath.

Hope stared at her searchingly, with a little strange laugh.

"Well," she said. "Really! Oughtn't he to know what he's doing? Why—why—what about me?"

"Settle that with yourself," said Mary gravely. "You'll have to anyway. But don't take out your unhappiness—your spite—on someone who never hurt you. What about me? Haven't I been fond of you? Why do you want to leave me to face what you've done? Do you think your friends will be spared?"

"My gracious," said Hope inadequately, "whose business is it but mine? Leave me alone, please, please. No one cares."

"That's what you thought about you and Tony," said Mary inexorably. "Nobody plays a lone hand."

"Oh," said Hope disdainfully, "you mean that someone is always looking over your shoulder and telling you how to play. But you pay your own losses. Oh, Mary, I want to go! And who on earth would know?"

"Everyone," insisted Mary. "His wife might learn, and spread it all over the country in the newspapers. Or she might exact half his fortune to keep silent. You'd be the flaw in his armour; you might cost him all he has spent his life building up. Then, if you did marry..."

"I don't want to marry him, or anyone," said Hope, goaded into utter frankness.

"Well," said Mary, "then you'll take a great deal and give nothing. After all, a man's got his name, too. Hope, what if your own people should hear?"

"Would
you
tell them?" asked Hope stormily. "Well, I'll go back. Please be quiet, Mary." She dropped to the bench, and leaned her head against the station wall, closing her eyes. The purpose went out of her face; she looked spent again. "I can't do anything," she muttered. "But I must, I must."

The thought that obsessed her was that if she failed to do something, and that quickly, some spring of life in her would fail. A creeping drowsiness threatened her, which it would pain her to fight off, as one feels when the air supply is short. Some necessary element had been taken from her in her great disillusionment. She knew she needed action in the same way that one nearly drowned must be tided through by forced breathing and involuntary motion.

"Come to the hotel and rest till the next train," said Mary gently. "And get something to eat."

"No. I must explain to him. I will go back if you will go on up and tell him why I didn't come. He's looking for me on this train. Here's my ticket; you use it," said Hope practically. "And give him this." She went into the telegraph room, wrote and sealed a message. "Hurry, the train is starting; I won't go unless you do."

Mary began to protest, thought better of it, kissed Hope and ran. Perhaps Hope needed to be alone. And, in spite of all her arguments, Mary was sorry for Edgerton. Hope went back to her bench, sat down listlessly, and felt herself going, very far away, to the poppy fields of her childhood—but now the poppies were black. She did not want to live. Her idol was very completely broken, and its pitiful clay feet forbade her weeping over the wreckage. Her tears, she reflected sardonically, would reduce it to the utmost of absurdity. So she sat, gazing into the dark And when Ned Angell stopped before her, he had to speak twice before she seemed to hear.

"What?" she said at last, impolitely, and turned a blank stare on him. "Good evening, Ned." If she had shouted, "Go away," it could have been no plainer. "What are you doing here?"

"I've been up for the week-end," he said. "Hope, you look like a ghost. You're ill; for Heaven's sake, let me get you something. I have some brandy in my suit-case. What are you doing here?"

"Eloping," she retorted. It was the nearest she could come to shrieking, or hurling a brick at him. It served. He was unintelligible for several minutes, and she watched him stonily. She had come to a point where her own despair was no longer tragic to her, and in that was tragedy beyond words. In her mind cause and effect were ranged side by side in grotesque disproportion, grinning at her. She was as one mortally wounded by a stiletto thrust, who looks at the tiny wound with horrified unbelief, knowing that insignificant aperture for a gateway to eternity. She forgot Edgerton for the moment; Mary had rudely torn him out of the foreground of possibilities, thrust her back upon her own ridiculous catastrophe. And Ned was the last straw. He was offering her brandy That reminded her, Edgerton had offered her the world. Probably Mary had it now; he might have been glad to be rid of it. "No, I really don't want any brandy," she said almost patiently, having produced her effect. "Yes, I was eloping, but I'm not. I changed my mind. Mary changed my mind. She's gone on."

"Who?"

"Mary Dark—oh, the man? I shan't tell you, Neddy. If any of your friends happen along, they'll think it's you."

"I wish it was," he said, and the bare simplicity of his speech struck some chord in her that resolved her again into a merely pitiful girl, aware of another's hurt, and sorry for it.

"Why, Ned, not you; it isn't possible."

"But it is—Hope, I can't talk to you here." Again Hope was aware of people regarding them with vague curiosity; they were at the further end of the platform, a little isolated, but scarcely invisible; they regarded each other dramatically, uncertainly, with tense white faces and the hint of outflung hands, their eyes challenging and defensive; it was not strange if people stared. Ned knew it also, but he could not stop; he could only urge her: "You're tired; you are ill. The train won't be in for another hour or more; it's late Have you had any supper? Come up to the hotel and rest a little."

Anywhere, she thought, to be rid of his immediate importunities. But the problem he presented she was grappling with ineffectually. It seemed she must be hopelessly imbecile. People were always surprising her now, turning to her unexpected surfaces, presenting her with new and incredible problems. Nothing was simple any more; it was all beyond her, amazing past conception. Everything that had seemed so plain and straightforward, all her everyday relations, took on a complexity that appalled her. Ned was not a harlequin, an incident; he was alive too; if one pricked him he bled. That much he was showing her, with all the fervour of a vain and mercurial nature, as they walked slowly in the green-dark obscurity of a bypath beside the road to the hotel.

"You must have guessed it," he insisted.

"No, I didn't," she sighed. "Why should I? I don't think you ever said anything, did you?" She groped in her memory. Perhaps he had spoken; she so seldom listened to him closely. Mostly she had laughed at him, or put him aside as one does a troublesome child.

"Why do you suppose I was always coming?"

He was almost angry; in the heat of his new passion it seemed to him that he had always cared so much. Now that she had so nearly gone from him forever, she was all that was desirable and dear. He had for long past known her heart was turned from him towards another man; he had guessed it to be Tony Yorke. Certainty had been impossible; she had her dignity, and had placed him unmistakably, sometimes pointedly, outside her confidence. And slowly her inacessibility had wrought on him. To-night, with the fine unreason of a new lover, he saw the whole world of men striving to tear her from him. That was the result of her challenge.

They were both rather mad, and it was night, and spring.

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "After all, you were always about some other girl, too. You were always at Mrs. Patten's, for the matter of that." Her hand was on his arm, and she felt him start. "You don't really care so much, do you, Ned? Not now, anyway, when I tell you Tony jilted me, and I came so near to running away with—another man?"

"Oh, Hope, I do, I do! There's only you. I don't care about whoever else it was... Do you care so much for Yorke?"

"No," she said slowly, "I don't care for anyone. It's all gone. But I'm tired." Presently she was weeping on his shoulder. "So tired. I haven't anything to give you."

He told her fervently that nothing was enough, if he might only hope. In some sense his chivalry was touched. It is hardly a quality to build on, in a sentimentalist, but in the clash and chaos of old illusions fallen about her ears it seemed as solid as anything. But he only won when he put forward his own need as a plea. He wanted her! He did want her; he ached for her; she felt it dimly—she had got into his blood.

To her, who had wanted so much and whose hands were so empty, it seemed unbearable that such a plea should go unanswered. Two people wretched were too many.

She wished only to see someone else happy, to remind herself that there was such a thing as joy in the world. Out of her enormous inexperience she was assured that her life was lived. And here was a way to end it neatly. Again her early training asserted itself, disastrous as any good rule is applied at the wrong moment. He was urging her to marry him. Marriage meant the end of the old order, a beginning of new things. It was a solution to hand; and it answered Mary's requirements; it would be according to the rules of the game. And it would make Ned happy! In fact, it was a sacrifice on the altar of happiness; it was neither for herself nor for Ned, but for the sake of happiness itself. She hovered fearfully on the brink, delayed putting her hand to the bond with idle questions that in themselves committed her.

They had seated themselves on a fallen log, just beyond the path, to avoid belated strollers. A long, harsh whistle pierced the night; Hope sprang to her feet.

"The East train!" she cried. "We forgot it; it's gone."

"Then marry me to-night," Ned said.

Now she looked over the edge of the unknown and drew back a step.

"No. Why, two hours ago... To-morrow you will think differently. Tell me to-morrow, if you do. I must go to the hotel and get a room. I tell you, I know we're insane."

"To-morrow I shall think the same," he said, and urged her again with wilder protestations, with the sheer strength of his own feelings.

He was intoxicated, beyond mere earthiness. He, too, had found romance. If Hope had been better able to draw an analogy, she would have made the woods echo with satiric mirth.

CHAPTER XVI

IF Mary had expected repose of mind after her embassy extraordinary to Edgerton, she was disappointed. She wanted Hope in plain sight, as a guarantee against any further outbreak of insanity, as she mildly termed it; and she did not even know where Hope was. She had nearly a week in which to exhaust her vocabulary of friendly abuse on nothing more tangible than a vague note from Hope posted at Banff and saying she needed a few days' rest and for Mary to notify the school of her intended absence.

During the week, between her anxious hours, the memory of that interview recurred to her. Edgerton had taken it as she might have known he would, had she paused beforehand to conjecture. His first look of alarm at sight of her, visible to her searching eye, despite his forced immobility of countenance; the expectancy that looked beyond her—for what, she did not have to guess—and the way he had squared his shoulders and hardened his face to the blow when she blurted out her errand; all this she could have foreseen. She might also have expected anger at her meddling, a disposition to brush her aside and take what had been in his grasp, or more weakly to plead his cause. He had done neither.

"Was she afraid of me after all?" he asked finally, with a touch of mingled shame and shyness.

"No," said Mary. "She wanted to come." He rose to his feet; Mary shook her head quickly. "Not now. You'll have to blame me; she won't come now. Think for yourself; was it fair?" She turned the other edge of the same argument on him.

"No," he muttered, "I knew it wasn't. And I wanted to help her." He did not say that he had justified himself with the belief that she was now no longer a child, nor perhaps even a maid. He did think that. The sense of futility he had felt before overcame him. "Oh, well—Miss Dark, will you be her friend? I—I guess I can't. And if there is anything I can do, let me know."

"I am her friend," said Mary, and knew it was time to go. "By the way, perhaps I'd better—resign?"

"Hell, no!" He turned on her. "Excuse me. But I guess I need you, too. Stay, if you don't mind. If you won't leave me anything else, you might at least stick around." He laughed.