"I suppose so. Only as it gave me life and as I love life I'm hardly the person to deliver an unbiased opinion on that point."

"Then you are not sad, you are not angry?" Damaris presently and rather unexpectedly asked.

"Yes--at times both, but not often or for long together. As I tell you I love life--love it too well to torment myself much about the manner of my coming by it. It might show more refinement of feeling perhaps to hang my head and let a certain ugly word blast my prospects. But I don't happen to see the business that way. On the contrary I hope to get every ounce of advantage out of it I can--use it as a spur rather than a hobble. And I love my profession too. It gives you room and opportunity. I am waiting now for my first ship, my first command. That's a fine thing and a strong one. For your first ship is as a bride to you, and your first command makes you as a king among men. Oh! on a small scale I grant; but, as far as it reaches, your authority is absolute. On board your own ship you are master with a vengeance--if you like. And I do like."

Faircloth said the last few words softly, but with a weight of meaning not to be misunderstood. He bent down, once more, chafed Damaris' feet and wrapped his jacket carefully round them.

"And, while you and I are alone together, there is something--as we've spoken so freely--which I want to tell you, so that there may be no misconception about me or about what I want.--As men in my rank of life go, I am well off. Rich--again on a small scale; but with means sufficient to meet all my needs. I'm not a spend-thrift by nature, luckily. And I have amply enough not only to hold my own in my profession and win through, but to procure myself the pleasures and amus.e.m.e.nts I happen to fancy. I want you to remember that, please. Tell me is it quite clear to you?"

"Yes," Damaris said, "you have made it quite clear."

Yet for the first time he jarred on her, as with a more than superficial difference of breeding and of cla.s.s. This mention of money offended her taste, seeming to lower the level upon which their extraordinary and--to her--terrible conversation had thus far moved. It hurt her with another kind of hurting--not magnificent, not absorbing, but just common. That in speaking of money he was protecting himself, proudly self-guarding his own honour and that of his mother, Lesbia Faircloth, never, in her innocence of what is mean and mercenary, occurred to Damaris.

So she took her hands off his shoulders and clasped them in her lap.

Clasped them with all her poor strength, striving even in this extreme, to maintain some measure of calm and of dignity. She must hold out, she told herself, just simply by force of will hold out, till she was away from him. After that, chaos--for thoughts, discoveries, apprehensions of possibilities in human intercourse hitherto undreamed of, were marshalled round her in close formation shoulder to shoulder. They only waited. An instant's yielding on her part, and they would be on to her, crushing down and in, making her brain reel, her mind stagger under their stifling crowded a.s.sault.

"Go back and row," she said, at once imploring and imperious. "Row quickly. I am very tired. I am cold. I want to be at home--to be in my own place."

CHAPTER VI

RECOUNTING AN ASTONISHING DEPOSITION

Theresa Bilson bustled upstairs. Barring the absence of the extra brake, which had caused--and for this she could not be sorry since didn't it justify her "att.i.tude" towards her recalcitrant ex-pupil?--some inconvenient overcrowding in transit to and from the station, and barring the rain, which set in between five and six o'clock, the expedition to Harchester pa.s.sed off with considerable _eclat_. Such, in any case, was Theresa's opinion, she herself having figured conspicuously in the foreground. During the inspection of the Cathedral the Dean paid her quite marked attention; thanks, in part, to her historical and archaeological knowledge--of which she made the most, and to her connection with the Verity family--of which she made the most also. In precisely what that connection might consist, the learned and timid old gentleman, being very deaf and rather near-sighted, failed to gather. He determined, however, to be on the safe side.

"Our genial Archdeacon," he said, "and his distinguished kinsman, Sir Charles? Ah! yes--yes--indeed--to be sure--with the greatest pleasure."

And he motioned the blushing Theresa to fall into step with him, and with Dr. Horniblow, at the head of the Deadham procession.

The afterglow of that triumphal progress irradiated her consciousness still, when--after depositing the Miss Minetts upon their own doorstep, with playful last words recalling the day's mild jokes and rallyings--she drove on to The Hard to find the household there in a state of sombre and most admired confusion.

Thus to arrive home in possession of a fine bag of news, only to discover an opposition and far finer bag ready awaiting you may well prove trying to the most high-souled and amiable of temper. By this time, between success and fatigue, Theresa could not be justly described as either high-souled or sweet tempered. She was at once inflated and on edge, and consequently hotly indignant, as though the unfairest march possible had been stolen upon her.

She bustled upstairs, and crossing the landing turned into the schoolroom pa.s.sage--a long, lamp-lit vista, hung with old Chinese wall-paper, the running pattern of buds and flowers, large out of all proportion to the bridges, palms, paG.o.das and groups of little purple and blue-clad men and women disposed, in dwindling perspective, upon its once white surface.

Half-way along the pa.s.sage, their backs towards her, Mary and Mrs.

Cooper, the cook--a fair, mild middle-aged, and cow-like person, of ample proportions--stood conversing in smothered tones.

"And it's my belief he's been and told her, or anyhow that she guesses, pore dear young lady," the latter, with upraised hands, lamented.

Theresa just caught these strange words. Caught too, Mary's hurried rejoinder--"For mercy's sake, Mrs. Cooper, not a hint of that to any living soul"--before the two women, sensible of the swish and patter of her self-important entry, turned and moved forward to meet, or--could it be?--to intercept her. Their faces bore a singular expression, in Mrs.

Cooper's case of sloppy, in Mary's of stern yet vivid alarm. Deeply engaged though she was with her private grievance, Miss Bilson could not but observe this. It made her nervous.

"What is the meaning," she began, her voice shrill with agitation, "of the extraordinary story about Miss Damaris which Laura reports to me?

Someone is evidently very much in fault."

"Please don't speak quite so loud, Miss," Mary firmly admonished her.

"I've just got Miss Damaris quieted off to sleep, and if she's roused up again, I won't answer for what mayn't happen."

"But what has happened? I insist upon knowing," Theresa declared, in growing offence and agitation.

"Ah! that's just what we should be thankful enough to have you tell us, Miss," Mrs. Cooper chimed in with heavy and reproachful emphasis upon the p.r.o.nouns.

To even the mild and cow-like revenge is sweet. Though honestly distressed and scared, the speaker entertained a most consoling conviction she was at this moment getting even with Theresa Bilson and cleverly paying off old scores.

"The pore dear young lady's caught her death as likely as not, out there across the river in the wet, let alone some sneaking rascal making off with her stockings and shoes. When I saw her little naked feet, all blue with the cold, it made my heart bleed, regularly bleed, it did. I could only give thanks her Nanna, pore Mrs. Watson, who worshipped the very ground Miss Damaris trod on, was spared living to see that afflicting sight."

Then with a change of tone exasperating--as it was designed to be--to one, at least, of her hearers, she added:

"I'll have that soup ready against Miss Damaris wakes, Mary, in case she should fancy it. Just touch the bell, will you, and I'll bring it up myself. It's not suitable to give either of the girls a chance for prying. They're a deal too curious as it is. And I'm only too pleased to watch with you, turn and turn about, as I told you, whenever you feel to require a rest. Lizzie will have to see to the cooking anyhow--except what's wanted for Miss Damaris. I couldn't put my mind into kitchen work to-night, not if you paid me ever so."

And on large flat feet she moved away towards the back-staircase, leading down to the offices from the far end of the pa.s.sage, leaving an odour of pastry behind her and of cloves.

"To think of what to-morrow may bring, ah! dear me," she murmured as she went.

During the ten minutes or so which immediately followed Theresa Bilson boxed the compa.s.s in respect of sensations, the needle, as may be noted, invariably quivering back to the same point--namely, righteous anger against Damaris. For was not that high-spirited maiden's imperviousness to influence and defiance of authority--her, Theresa's, influence and authority--the mainspring of all this disastrous complication? Theresa found it convenient to believe so, and whip herself up to almost frantic determination in that belief. It was so perfectly clear. All the more clear because her informant, Mary, evidently did not share her belief.

Mary's account of to-day's most vexatious transactions betrayed partizanship and prejudice, such as might be expected from an uneducated person, offering--as Theresa a.s.sured herself--a pertinent example of the workings of "the servant mind." Nevertheless uneasy suspicion dogged her, a haunting though unformulated dread that other persons--one person above all others--might endorse Mary's prejudices rather than her own, so reasonably based, conviction.

"If only Mr. Patch had been in there'd have been somebody to depend on,"

the woman told her, recounting the anxious search after vanished Damaris.

"But he'd driven into Marychurch of course, starting ever so early because of the parcels he had your orders to call for at the several shops, before meeting the train. And the gardeners had left work on account of the wet; so we'd n.o.body to send to make enquiries anywhere except Tolling, and that feather-head Alfred, who you can't trust half a minute out of your sight." Here she paused in her narrative and made a move, adroitly driving Theresa Bilson before her out on to the landing, thus putting a greater distance between that tormented spinster and the neighbourhood of Damaris' bed-chamber. Her handsome brown eyes held the light of battle and her colour was high. She straightened a chair, standing against the wall at the stair-head, with a neatly professional hand in pa.s.sing.

"Mrs. Cooper and I were fairly wild waiting down on the sea-wall with the lantern, thinking of drowning and--worse,--when"--she glanced sharply at her companion and, lowering her eyes altered the position of the chair by a couple of inches--"when Captain Faircloth's boat came up beside the breakwater and he carried Miss Damaris ash.o.r.e and across the garden."

"Stop"--Theresa broke in--"I do not follow you. Faircloth, Captain Faircloth? You are not, I earnestly hope, speaking of the owner of that low public-house on the island?"

"Yes--him," Mary returned grimly, her eyes still lowered.

"And do you mean me to understand that this young man carried Miss Damaris--actually carried her"--Miss Bilson choked and cleared her throat with a foolish little crowing sound--"carried her all the way into the house--in his arms?"

"Yes, in his arms, Miss. How else would you have had him carry her?--And, as gentle and careful as any woman could, too--into the house and right upstairs here"--pointing along the pa.s.sage as if veritably beholding the scene once more--"and into her own bedroom."

"How shocking. How extremely improper!"

Theresa beat her fat little hands hysterically together. She credited herself with emotions of the most praiseworthy and purest; ignorant that the picture conjured up before her provoked obscure physical jealousies, obscure stirrings of latent unsatisfied pa.s.sion. More than ever, surely, did the needle quiver back to that fixed point of most righteous anger.

"Such--such a proceeding cannot have been necessary. It ought not to have been permitted. Why did not Miss Damaris walk?"

"Because she was in a dead faint, and we'd all the trouble in life to bring her round."

"Indeed," she said, and that rather nastily. "I am sorry, but I cannot but believe Miss Damaris might have made an effort to walk--with your a.s.sistance and that of Cooper, had you offered it. As I remarked at first, someone is evidently very much to blame. The whole matter must be thoroughly sifted out, of course. I am disappointed, for I had great confidence in you and Cooper--two old servants who might really have been expected to possess some idea of the--the respect due to their master's daughter. What will Sir Charles say when he hears of this objectionable incident?"

"That's just what Mrs. Cooper and I are wondering, Miss," Mary took her up with so much meaning that Miss Bilson inwardly quailed, sensible of having committed a rather egregious blunder. This she made efforts to repair by sheering off hurriedly on another tack.

"Not that I shall trouble Sir Charles with the matter, unless circ.u.mstances arise which compel me to do so--as a duty. My great object, of course, is at all times to spare him any domestic annoyance."

She began pulling off her gloves, a new pair and tight. Her hands were moist and the glove-fingers stuck, rendering their removal lengthy and difficult.