Tales of two people

She appreciated the line I took. She had expected surprise and fencing; it amused and pleased her to meet with neither. She was in the mood (by the way, we could see the black-dashed white frock and Fullard’s manly figure a quarter of a mile away) to meet frankness with its fellow.

“She never put in a word for me,” she said, smiling. “With father, I mean.”

“She doesn’t understand business,” I pleaded.

“I’ve been expected to sympathise with her bad luck!”

So had I – by the captain, half-an-hour before. But I did not mention it.

“The Bittleton Club thinks I ought to – to do something?”

I laughed at her taking our club as the arbiter. She had infused a pretty irony into her question.

“It does, Miss Gladwin.” My answer maintained the ironical note.

“Then I will,” said she, with a highly delusive appearance of simplicity.

I could not quite make her out, but it came home to me that her secret resentment against Nettie Tyler was very bitter.

She spoke again in a moment: “A word from her would have gone a long way with father.”

“That’s all in the past, isn’t it?” I murmured soothingly.

“The past!” She seemed to throw doubt on the existence of such a thing.

The captain’s manly figure and the neat little shape in white and black were approaching us. The stress of feeling has to be great before it prevents sufferers from turning up to tea. Miss Gladwin glanced toward her advancing guests, smiled, and relighted the spirit-lamp under the kettle. I suppose I was looking thoughtful, for the next moment she said, “Rather late in the day to do anything? Is that what’s in your mind? Will they say that?”

“How can I tell? Your adherents say you’ve been like sisters.”

“I never had a sister younger and prettier than myself,” said she. She waved her hand to the new arrivals, now close on us. “I nearly had a stepmother like that, though,” she added.

I did not like her at that moment; but is anybody attractive when he is fighting hard for his own? Renunciation is so much more picturesque. She was fighting – or preparing to fight. I had suddenly realised the position, for all that the garden was so peaceful, and spring was on us, and Nettie’s new-born laugh rang light across the grass, so different from the cry we once had heard from her lips in that place.

Beatrice Gladwin looked at me with a suddenly visible mockery in her dark eyes. She had read my thoughts, and she was admitting that she had. She was very “hard.” Fullard was perfectly right. Yet I think that if she had been alone at that moment she might have cried. That was just an impression of mine; really she gave no tangible ground for it, save in an odd constraint of her mouth. The next moment she laughed.

“I like a fight to be a fair fight,” she said, and looked steadily at me for a moment. She raised her voice and called to them: “Come along; the tea’s getting cold.” She added to me, “Come to my room at ten to-morrow, please.”

The rest of the evening she was as much like velvet as it was in a Gladwin to be. But I waited. I wanted to know how she meant to arrange her fair fight. She wanted one. A sportsman, after all, you see.

V

SHE was not like velvet when we met the next morning after breakfast in her study: her own room was emphatically a study, and in no sense a boudoir. She was like iron, or like the late Sir Thomas when he gave me instructions for his new will and for the settlement on his intended marriage with Miss Nettie Tyler. There was in her manner the same clean-cut intimation that what she wanted from me was not advice, but the promptest obedience. I suppose that she had really made up her mind the day before – even while we talked on the lawn, in all probability.

“I wish you, Mr Foulkes,” she said, “to be so good as to make arrangements to place one hundred thousand pounds at my disposal at the bank as soon as possible.”

I knew it would be no use, but my profession demanded a show of demur. “A very large sum just now – with the duties – and your schemes for the future.”

“I’ve considered the amount carefully; it’s just what appears to me proper and sufficient.”

“Then I suppose there’s no more to be said,” I sighed resignedly.

She looked at me with a slight smile. “Of course you guess what I’m going to do with it?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so. You ought to have it properly settled on her, you know. It should be carefully tied up.”

The suggestion seemed to annoy her.

“No,” she said sharply. “What she does with it, and what becomes of it, have nothing to do with me. I shall have done my part. I shall be – free.”

“I wish you would take the advice of somebody you trust.”

That softened her suddenly. She put her hand out across the table and pressed mine for a moment. “I trust you very much. I have no other friend I trust so much. Believe that, please. But I must act for myself here.” She smiled again, and with the old touch of irony added, “It will satisfy your friends at the Bittleton Club?”

“It’s a great deal too much,” I protested, with a shake of the head. “Thirty would have been adequate; fifty, generous; a hundred thousand is quixotic.”

“I’ve chosen the precise sum most carefully,” Miss Gladwin assured me. “And it’s anything but quixotic,” she added, with a smile.

A queer little calculation was going on in my brain. Wisdom (or interest, which you will) and twenty-five thousand a year against love and three thousand – was that, in her eyes, a fair fight? Perhaps the reckoning was not so far out. At any rate, love had a chance – with three thousand pounds a year. There is more difference between three thousand pounds and nothing than exists between three thousand and all the rest of the money in the world.

“Is Miss Tyler aware of your intentions?”

“Not yet, Mr Foulkes.”

“She’ll be overwhelmed,” said I. It seemed the right observation to offer.

For the first time, Miss Gladwin laughed openly. “Will she?” she retorted, with a scorn that was hardly civil. “She’ll think it less than I owe her.”

“You owe her nothing. What you may choose to give – ”

Miss Gladwin interrupted me without ceremony “She confuses me with fate – with what happened – with her loss – and – and disappointment. She identifies me with all that.”

“Then she’s very unreasonable.”

“I daresay; but I can understand.” She smiled. “I can understand very well how one girl can seem like that to another, Mr Foulkes – how she can embody everything of that sort.” She paused and then added: “If I thought for a moment that she’d be – what was your foolish word? – oh yes, ‘overwhelmed,’ I wouldn’t do it. But I know her much too well. You remember that my adherents say we’ve been like sisters? Don’t sisters understand each other?”

“You’re hard on her – hard and unfair,” I said. Her bitterness was not good to witness.

“Perhaps I’m hard; I’m not unfair.” Her voice trembled a little; her composure was not what it had been at the beginning of our interview. “At any rate, I’m trying to be fair now; only you mustn’t – you must not – think that she’ll be overwhelmed.”

“Very well,” said I. “I won’t think that. And I’ll put matters in train about the money. You’ll have to go gently for a bit afterwards, you know. Even you are not a gold mine.” She nodded, and I rose from my chair. “Is that all for to-day?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “You’re going away?”

“Yes, I must get back to Bittleton. The office waits.”

She gave me her hand. “I shall see you again before long,” she said. “Remember, I’m trying to be fair – fair to everybody. Yes, fair to myself too. I think I’ve a right to fair treatment. I’m giving myself a chance too, Mr Foulkes. Good-bye.”

Her dismissal was not to be questioned, but I should have liked more light on her last words. I had seen enough to understand her impulse to give Nettie Tyler a fair field, to rid her of the handicap of penury, to do the handsome thing, just when it seemed most against her own interest. That was the sportsmanlike side of her, working all the more strongly because she disliked her rival. I saw too, though not at the time quite so clearly, in what sense she was trying to be fair to Captain Spencer Fullard: she thought the scales were weighted too heavily against the disinterested – shall I say the romantic? – side of that gentleman’s disposition. But that surely was quixotic, and she had denied quixotism. Yet it was difficult to perceive how she was giving herself a chance, as she had declared. She seemed to be throwing her best chance away; so it appeared in my matter-of-fact eyes. Or was she hoping to dazzle Fullard with the splendour of her generosity? She had too much penetration to harbour any such idea. He would think the gift handsome, even very handsome, but he would be no more overwhelmed than Nettie Tyler herself. Even impartial observers at Bittleton had talked of fifty thousand pounds as the really proper thing. If Fullard were in love with Nettie, he would think double the amount none too much; and if he were not – well, then, where was Beatrice Gladwin’s need for fair treatment – her need to be given a chance at all? For, saving love, she held every card in the game.