Don't underrate your own cleverness." Hearing him, sensible of his apparent impatience and misconceiving the cause of it, Damaris' temper stirred. She felt vexed. She also felt injured.

"What has happened to you, Colonel Sahib?" she asked him squarely. "I see nothing foolish in what I have said. You wouldn't have me so conceited that I rushed into this immense business without a qualm, without any thought whether I can carry it out creditably--with credit to him, I mean?"

Thus astonishingly attacked, Carteret hedged.

"Miss Verity, of course, will be"--he began.

Damaris cut him short.

"Aunt Felicia is an angel, a darling," she declared, "but--but"--

And there stopped, p.r.i.c.ked by a guilty conscience. For to expose Miss Felicia's inadequacies and enlarge on her ineligibility for the position of feminine Chief of the Staff, struck her as unworthy, a meanness to which, under existing circ.u.mstances, she could not condescend to stoop.

Carteret looked up, to be entranced not only by the fair spectacle of her youth but by her delicious little air of shame and self-reproach.

Evidently she had caught herself out in some small naughtiness--was both penitent and defiant, at once admitting her fault and pleading for indulgence. He suspected some thought at the back of her mind which he could neither exactly seize nor place. She baffled him with her changes of mood and of direction--coming close and then slipping from under his hand. This humour was surely new in her. She would not leave him alone, would not let him rest. Had she developed, since last he had converse with her, into a practised coquette?

"Look here, dear witch," he said, making a return upon himself, and manfully withstanding the sweet provocation of her near neighbourhood.

"We seem to be queerly at cross purposes. I can't pretend to follow the turnings and doublings of your ingenious mind. I gather there is something you want of me. To be plain, then, what is it?"

"That--that you shouldn't desert me--desert us--in this crisis. You have never deserted me before--never since I can first remember."

"I desert you--good Lord!" Carteret exclaimed, his hands dropping at his sides with an odd sort of helplessness.

"Ah! that's asking too much, I suppose," she said. "I'm selfish even to think of it. Yet how can I do otherwise? Don't you understand how all difficulties would vanish, and how beautifully simple and easy everything would be if you coached me--if you, dear Colonel Sahib, went with us?"

The man with the blue eyes looked down at the tiger skin again, his countenance strained and blanched.

More than ever did he find her humour baffling. Not once nor twice had he, putting force upon himself, resisted the temptation to woo her--witness his retirement from St. Augustin and his determined abstinence from intercourse with her since. But now, so it might veritably appear, the positions were reversed and she wooed him. Though whether pushed to that length merely by wayward fancy, by some transient skittish influence or frolic in the blood, or by realized design he had no means of judging.--Well, he had bidden her be plain, and she, in some sort at least, obeyed him. It behooved him, therefore, to be plain in return, in as far as a straightforward reading of her meaning would carry.

"So you think all would be simple and easy were I to go with you and your father?" he said, both speech and manner tempered to gentleness. "I am glad to have you think so--should be still more glad could I share your belief. But I know better, dearest witch--know that you are mistaken.

This is no case of desertion--put that out of your precious mind once and for all--but of discretion. My being in attendance, far from simplifying, would embroil and distort your position. An elderly gentleman perpetually trotting"--

"Don't," Damaris cried, holding up both hands in hot repudiation. "Don't say that. There's distortion if you like! It's ugly--I won't have it, for it is not true."

In the obvious sincerity of which denunciation Carteret found balm; yet adhered to his purpose.

"But it is true, alas; and I therefore repeat it both for your admonition and my own. For an elderly gentleman trotting at a young girl's heels is a most unedifying spectacle--giving occasion, and reasonably, to the enemy to blaspheme--bad for her in numberless ways; and, if he's any remnant of self-respect left in him, is anything better than a fatuous dotard, d.a.m.nably bad for him as well. Do you understand?"

Damaris presented a mutinous countenance. She would have had much ado to explain her own motives during this ten minutes' conference. If her mental--or were they not rather mainly emotional?--turnings and doublings proved baffling to her companion, they proved baffling to herself in an almost greater degree. Things in general seemed to have gone into the melting-pot. So many events had taken place, so many more been preshadowed, so many strains of feeling excited! And these were confusingly unrelated, or appeared to be so as yet. Amongst the confusion of them she found no sure foothold, still less any highway along which to travel in confidence and security. Her thought ran wild. Her intentions ran with it, changing their colour chameleon-like from minute to minute.

Now she was tempted to make an equivocal rejoinder.

"To understand," she said, "is not always, Colonel Sahib, necessarily to agree."

"I am satisfied with understanding and don't press for agreement," he answered, and on an easier note--"since to me it is glaringly evident you should take this fine flight unhandicapped. My duty is to stand aside and leave you absolutely free--not because I enjoy standing aside, but"--he would allow sentiment such meagre indulgence--"just exactly because I do not."

Here for the second time, at the crucial moment, Felicia Verity made irruption upon the scene. But though her entrance was hurried, it differed fundamentally from that earlier one; so that both the man and the girl, standing in the proximity of their intimate colloquy before the fire, were sensible of and arrested by it. She was self-forgetful, self-possessed, the exalted touch of a pure devotion upon her.

"I have been with my brother Charles," she began, addressing them both.

"I happened to see Hordle coming from the library--and I put off dinner.

I thought, darling"--this to Damaris, with a becoming hint of deference--"I might do so. I gathered that Charles--that your father--wished it. He has not been feeling well."

And as Damaris anxiously exclaimed--

"Yes"--Miss Felicia went on--"not at all well. Hordle told me. That was why I went to the library. He hoped, if he waited and rested for a little while, the uncomfortable sensations might subside and it would be needless to mention them. He did not want any fuss made. We gave him restoratives, and he recovered from the faintness. But he won't be equal, he admits, to coming in to dinner. Colonel Carteret must be hungry--your father begs us to wait no longer, I a.s.sured him we would not. Hordle is with him. He should not be alone, I think, while any pain continues."

"Pain--pain?" Damaris cried, her imagination rather horribly caught by the word. "But is he hurt, has he had some accident?"

While Carteret asked tersely: "Pain--and where?"

"Here," Felicia answered, laying her hand upon her left side over the heart. She looked earnestly at Carteret as she spoke, conveying to him an alarm she sought to spare Damaris.

"He tries to make little of it, and a.s.sures me it was only the heat of the house which caused him discomfort after the cold air out of doors.

It may be only that, but I think we ought to make sure."

Again, and with that same becoming hint of deference, she turned to her niece.

"So I sent orders that Patch should drive at once to Stourmouth and fetch Dr. McCabe. I did not stop to consult you because it seemed best he should take out the horses before they were washed down and stabled."

"Yes--but I can go to him?" Damaris asked.

"Darling--of course. But I would try to follow his lead, if I were you--treat it all lightly, since he so wishes. Your father knows best in most things--and may know best in this. Please G.o.d it is so."

Left alone with Carteret.

"I am anxious--most cruelly anxious about my brother," she said.

While Damaris, sweeping across the hall and down the corridor in her sunshine silken dress, repeated:

"The ponies--the smugglers' ponies," a sob in her throat.

CHAPTER VII

TELLING HOW CHARLES VERITY LOOKED ON THE MOTHER OF HIS SON

"Which is equivalent to saying, 'Hear the conclusion of the whole matter,' isn't it, McCabe?"

Dr. McCabe's square, hairy-backed hands fumbled with the stethoscope as he pushed it into his breast pocket, and, in replying, his advertised cheerfulness rang somewhat false.

"Not so fast, Sir Charles--in the good Lord's name, not so fast. While there's life there's hope, it's me settled opinion. I'm never for signing a patient's death-warrant before the blessed soul of him's entirely parted company with its mortal tenement of clay. The normal human being takes a mighty lot of killing in my experience, where the will to live is still intact. Let alone that you can never be quite upsides with Nature.

Ah! she's an astonishing box of tricks to draw on where final dissolution's concerned. She glories to turn round on your pathological and biological high science; and, while you're measuring a man for his coffin, to help him give death the slip."

Charles Verity slightly shifted his position--and that with singular carefulness--against the pillows in the deep red-covered chair. His hands, inert and bluish about the finger-tips, lay along the padded arms of it. The jacket of his grey-and-white striped flannel sleeping-suit was unfastened at the throat, showing the irregular lift and fall of his chest with each laboured breath. His features were accentuated, his face drawn and of a surprising pallor.

The chair, in which he sat, had been brought forward into the wide arc of the great window forming the front of the room. Two bays of this stood open down to the ground. Looking out, beyond the rich brown of the newly-turned earth in the flower-beds, the lawn stretched away--a dim greyish green, under the long shadows cast by the hollies masking the wall on the left, and glittering, powdered by myriads of scintillating dewdrops, where the early sunshine slanted down on it from between their stiff pinnacles and sharply serrated crests.