The King's Stratagem, and Other Stories

She shook her head. "No duties, at any rate."

"And so you think," he asked, his eyes fixed upon her changing features, "that I should go back to my old way of life-of a century ago?"

"Of course you must!" But she was not so rude as to tell him what a very foolish question this was. Still it was, was it not?

"So I will, or to something like it, and yet very unlike. But not alone. Joan, will you come with me? If I have known you but a month, I have learned to love your truth and goodness and you, Joan, so that if I go away alone, to return to the old life would be bitterly impossible. You have spoiled that; you must make for me a fresh life in its place. Do you remember you told me that when we knew one another we might be better friends? I have come to know you better, but we cannot be friends. We must be something more, more even than lovers, Joan-husband and wife, if you can like me enough."

It was not an unmanly way of putting it, and he was in earnest. But so quiet, so self-restrained was his manner that it savored of coldness. The girl whose hand he held while he spoke had no such thought. Her face was turned from him. She was gazing over the wall across the paddock where Maggie's mare was peaceably and audibly feeding, and so at the Blore Ash on its mimic hill, every bough and drooping branchlet dark against the sunset sky; and this radiant in her eyes with a beauty its deepest glow had never held for her before. The sweetest joy was in her heart, and grief in her face. He had been worthy of himself and her love. While he spoke she told herself, not that some time she might love him, but that she had given him all her true heart already. And yet as he was worthy, so she must be worthy and do her part.

"You have done me a great honor," she said at last, drawing away her hand from his grasp, though she did not turn her face, "but it cannot be, Mr. Maitland. I am very grateful to you-I am indeed, and sorry."

"Why can it not be?" he said shortly; startled, I am bound to say, and mortified.

"Because of-of many things. One is that I should not make you happy, nor you me. I am not suited to your way of life. I am of the country, and I love to be free and unconstrained, while you are of the town. Oh, we should not get on at all! Perhaps you would not be ashamed of me as your wife, but you might be, and I could not endure the chance even of it. There," she added, with a laugh in which a woman's ear might have detected the suppression of a sob, "is one sober reason where none can be needed."

"Is that your only reason?"

She was picking the mortar out of the wall. "Oh, dear me, no! I have a hundred, but that is a sufficient one," she answered almost carelessly, flirting a scrap of lime from the wall with her forefinger.

"And you have been playing with me all this time!" cried he, obtusely enraged by her flippancy.

"Not knowingly, not knowingly, indeed!"

"Can you tell me that you were not aware that I loved you?"

"Well, I thought-the fact is, I thought that you were amusing yourself-in West End fashion."

"Coquette!"

"Mr. Maitland!" she cried vehemently, "how dare you? There is proof, if any were needed, that I am right. You would not have dared to say that to any of your town acquaintances. I am no coquette. If I have given you pain, I am very sorry. And-I beg that we may part friends."

She had begun fiercely, with all her old spirit. He turned away, and she ended with a sudden, anxious, pitiful lameness, that yet, so angry and dull of understanding was he, taught him nothing.

"Friends!" he cried impatiently. "I told you that it was impossible. Oh, Joan, think again! Have I been too hasty? Have I given you no time to weigh it? Have I just offended you in some little thing? Then let me come to you again in three months, after I have been back among my old friends?"

"No, don't do that, Mr. Maitland. It will be of no use and will but give us pain."

"And yet I will come," he replied firmly, endeavoring by the very eager longing of his own gaze to draw from her fair, downcast face some sign of hope. "I will come, if you forbid me a hundred times. And if you have been playing with me-true, I am in no mood for soft words now-it shall be your punishment to say me nay, again. I shall be here, Joan, to ask you in three months from to-day."

"I cannot prevent you," she said. "Believe me, I shall only have the same answer for you."

"I shall come," he said doggedly, and looked at her with eyes reluctant to quit her drooping lashes lest they should miss some glance bidding his heart take courage. But none came, only the color fluttered uncertainly in her face. So he slowly turned away from her at last and walked across the garden, and out of sight by the gate into the road. He saw nothing of the long, dusty track, and straggling hedges bathed in the last glows of sunset. Those big gray eyes, so frank and true, came again and again between him and the prospect, and blinded his own with a hot mist of sorrow and anger. Ah, Blore, thou wast mightily avenged!

* * * * *

It is a hot afternoon in August, laden with the hum of dozing life. The sun has driven the less energetic members of the Quaritch family into the cool gloom of the drawing room, where the open windows are shaded by the great cedar. Mrs. Quaritch, upon the sofa, is nodding over a book. Joan, in a low wicker seat, may be doing the same; while Agnes, pursuing a favorite employment upon the hearthrug, is now and again betrayed by a half stifled growl from one or other of the dogs as they rise and turn themselves reproachfully, and flop down again with a sigh in a cool place.

"Agnes," cries her mother, upon some more distinct demonstration of misery being made, "for goodness' sake leave the dogs alone. They have not had a moment's peace since lunch."

"A dog's life isn't peace, mamma," she answers, with the simple air of a discoverer of truth. But, nevertheless, she looks about for fresh worlds to conquer.

"Even Mr. Maitland was better than this," she announces, after a long yawn of discontent, "though he was dull enough, I wonder why he did not come in July. Do you know, Joan?"

"Oh, Agnes, do let us have a moment's peace for once! We are not dogs," cried Joan fretfully.

Wonder! she was always wondering. This very minute, while her eyes were on the page, it was in her mind. Through all those three months passing hour by hour and day by day, she could assure herself that when he had come and gone, she would be at rest again; things would be as before with her. Let him come and go! But when July arrived, and he did not, a sharper pain made itself felt. Bravely as she strove to beat it down, well as she might hide it from others, the certainty that it had needed no second repulse to balk his love sorely hurt her pride. Just her pride, she told herself; nothing else. That he had not stood the test he had himself proposed; that any unacknowledged faintest hope she might have cherished, deep down in her heart, that he might master her by noble persistence, must now be utterly quenched; these things of course had no bitterness for her through the hot August days; had nothing to do with the wearied look that sometimes dulled the gray eyes, nor with the sudden indifference or as sudden enthusiasms for lawn tennis and dogs and pigeons, that marked her daily moods.

Agnes' teasing, by putting her meditations into words, has disturbed her. She gets up and moves restlessly about, touching this thing and that, and at last leaves the room and stands in the hall, thinking. Here, too, it is dark and cool, and made to seem more so-the door into the garden being open-by the hot glare of sunshine falling upon the spotless doorstep. She glances at this listlessly. The house is still, the servants are at the back; the dogs all worn out by the heat. Then, as she hesitates, a slight crunching of footsteps upon the gravel comes to her ear, breaking the silence. A sudden black shadow falls upon the sunny step and tells of a visitor. Someone chases away his shadow, and steps upon the stone, and raises his gloved hand to the bell. Charles Maitland at last!

Coming straight in from the sunshine he cannot see the swift welcome that springs to eye and cheek, a flash of light and color, quick to come and go. He is too much moved himself to mark how her hand shakes. He sees no difference in her. But she sees a change in him. She detects some subtle difference that eludes her attempt to define its nature and only fills her with a vague sense that this is not the Charles Maitland from whom she parted.

It is a meeting she has pictured often, but not at all like this. He signs to her to take him into the dining room, the door of which stands open.

"I have come back, Miss Joan."

"Yes?" she answers, sitting down with an attempt to still the tumult within, with such success that she brings herself for the moment nearly to the frame of mind in which they parted, and there is the same weary sufferance in her tone.

"I have come back as I said I would. I have overstepped the three months, but I had a good reason for my delay. Indeed I have been in doubt whether I ought to see you again at all, only I could not bear you to think what you naturally would. I felt that I must see you, even if it cost us both pain." There is a new awkwardness in his tone and pose.

"I told you that it was-quite unnecessary-and useless," she answers, with a strange tightening in her throat.

"Then it can do you no harm," he assents quietly. "I have come back not to repeat my petition, but to tell you why I do not and cannot."

"I think," she puts in coldly, "that upon the whole you had better spare yourself the unpleasantness of explaining anything to me. Don't you think so? I asked you for no proof, and held out no hope. Why do you trouble me? Why have you come back?"

"You have not changed!"

For the first time a ring of contempt in her voice takes the place of cold indifference. "I do not change in three months, Mr. Maitland. But there! my mother will wish to see you, and so will Agnes, who is hankering after something to happen. They are in the drawing room."

"But, Miss Joan, grant me one moment! You have not heard my reasons."

"Your reasons! Is it absolutely necessary?" she asks, half fretfully, half scornfully; her uppermost thought an intense desire to be by herself in her own room, with the door safely locked.

"I think so, at any rate. Why, I see! By Jove! of course you must be thinking the worst of me now! Oh, no! if you could not love me, Joan-pray pardon me, I had no right to call you by your name-you need not despise me. I cannot again ask you to be my wife, because," he laughs uneasily, "fortune has put it out of my power to take a wife. My trustee has made ducks and drakes of my property, or rather bulls and bears. I have but a trifle left to begin the world upon, and far too little to marry upon."

"I read of it in the papers. I saw that a Mr. Maitland was the chief sufferer, but I did not connect him with you," she says, in a low voice.

"No, of course not. How should you?" he answers lightly. But nevertheless her coldness is dreadful to him. He had thought she would express some sympathy. And gayly as he talks of it, he feels something of the importance of a ruined man and something of his claim to pity.

"And what are you going to do?"

"Do? We've arranged all that. They say there is a living to be made at the Bar in New Zealand, if one does not object to riding boots and spurs as part of the professional costume. Of course it will be a different sort of life, and Agnes' favorite patent leathers will be left behind in every sense. This would have been a bad blow to me" – there is a slight catch in his voice, and he gets up, and looks out of one of the windows with his back to her-"now I have learned from you that life should not be all lounging round the table and looking over other people's cards. It has been a sharp lesson, but very opportune as things have turned out. I am ready to take a hand myself now-even without a partner."

He does not at once turn round. He had not fancied she would take it like this, and he listens for a word to tell him that at any rate she is sorry-is grieved as for a stranger. Then he feels a sudden light, timid touch upon his arm. Joan is standing quite close to him, and does not move or take away her hand as he turns. Only she looks down at the floor when she speaks:

"I think I should be better than-than dummy-if you will take me to New Zealand."

Half laughing, half crying, and wholly confused, she looks up into his astonished face with eyes so brimful of love and tenderness that they tell all her story. For just an instant his eyes meet hers. Then, with a smothered exclamation, he draws her to him-and-in fact smothers the exclamation.