The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Given Case/Chapter 1
THE GIVEN CASE
I
Barton Reeve waited, with outward rigour and inward rage, till every one had gone: there was in particular an objectionable, travelled, superior young man—a young man with a long neck and bad shoes, especially great on Roumania—whom he was determined to outstay. He could only wonder the while whether he most hated designed or unconscious unpleasantness. It was a Sunday afternoon, the time in the week when, for some subtle reason, 'such people'—Reeve freely generalised them—most take liberties. But even when the young man had disappeared there still remained Mrs. Gorton, Margaret Hamer's sister, and actual hostess—it was with this lady that Miss Hamer was at present staying. He was sustained, however, as he had been for half an hour previous, by the sense that the charming girl knew perfectly he had some thing to say to her and was trying covertly to help him. 'Only hang on: leave the rest to me'—something of that sort she had already conveyed to him. He left it to her now to get rid of her sister, and was struck by the wholly natural air with which she soon achieved this feat. It was not absolutely hidden from him that if he had not been so insanely in love he might like her for herself. As it was, he could only like her for Mrs. Despard. Mrs. Gorton was dining out, but Miss Hamer was not; that promptly turned up, with the effect of bringing on, for the former lady, the question of time to dress. She still remained long enough to say over and over that it was time. Meanwhile, a little awkwardly, they hung about by the fire. Mrs. Gorton looked at her pretty shoe on the fender, but Barton Reeve and Miss Hamer were on their feet as if to declare that they were fixed.
'You're dining all alone?' he said to the girl.
'Women never dine alone,' she laughed. 'When they're alone they don't dine.'
Mrs. Gorton looked at her with an expression of which Reeve became aware: she was so handsome that, but for its marked gravity, it might have represented the pleasure and pride of sisterhood. But just when he most felt such complacency to be natural his hostess rather sharply mystified him. She won't be alone—more's the pity!' Mrs. Gorton spoke with more intention than he could seize, and the next moment he was opening the door for her.
'I shall have a cup of coffee and a biscuit—and also, propped up before me, Gardiner's Civil War. Don't you always read when you dine alone?' Miss Hamer asked as he came back.
Women were strange—he was not to be drawn in that direction. She had been showing him for an hour that she knew what he wanted; yet now that he had got his chance—which she moreover had given him—she looked as innocent as the pink face in the oval frame above the chimney. It took him, however, but a moment to see more: her innocence was her answer to the charge with which her sister had retreated, a charge into which, the next minute, her conscious blankness itself helped him to read a sense. Margaret Hamer was never alone, because Phil Mackern was always—But it was none of his business! She lingered there on the rug, and it somehow passed between them before anything else was done that he quite recognised that. After the point was thus settled he took his own affair straight up. 'You know why I'm here. It's because I believe you can help me.'
'Men always think that. They think every one can "help" them but themselves.'
'And what do women think?' Barton Reeve asked with some asperity. 'It might be a little of a light for me if you were able to tell me that. What do they think a man is made of? What does she think———?'
A little embarrassed, Margaret looked round her, wishing to show she could be kind and patient, yet making no movement to sit down. Mrs. Gorton's allusion was still in the air—it had just affected their common comfort. 'I know what you mean. You assume she tells me everything.'
'I assume that you're her most intimate friend. I don't know to whom else to turn.'
The face the girl now took in was smooth-shaven and fine, a face expressing penetration up to the limit of decorum. It was full of the man's profession—passionately legal. Barton Reeve was certainly concerned with advice, but not with taking it. 'What particular thing,' she asked, 'do you want me to do?'
'Well, to make her see what she's doing to me. From you she'll take it. She won't take it from me. She doesn't believe me—she thinks I'm "prejudiced." But she'll believe you.'
Miss Hamer smiled, but not with cruelty. 'And whom shall I believe?'
'Ah, that's not kind of you!' Barton Reeve returned; after which, for a moment, as he stood there sombre and sensitive, something visibly came to him that completed his thought, but that he hesitated to produce. Presently, as if to keep it back, he turned away with a jerk. He knew all about the girl herself—the woman of whom they talked had, out of the fulness of her own knowledge, told him; he knew what would have given him a right to say: 'Oh, come; don't pretend I've to reveal to you what the dire thing makes of us!' He moved across the room and came back—felt himself even at this very moment, in the grip of his passion, shaken as a rat by a terrier. But just that was what he showed by his silence. As he rejoined her by the chimney-piece he was extravagantly nervous. 'Oh Lord, Lord!' he at last simply exclaimed.
'I believe you—I believe you,' she replied. 'But she really does too.'
'Then why does she treat me so?—it's a refinement of perversity and cruelty. She never gives me an inch but she takes back the next day ten yards; never shows me a gleam of sincerity without making up for it as soon as possible by something that leaves me in no doubt of her absolute heartless coquetry. Of whom the deuce is she afraid?'
His companion hesitated. 'You perhaps might remember once in a while that she has a husband.'
'Do I ever forget it for an instant? Isn't my life one long appeal to her to get rid of him?'
'Ah,' said his friend as if she knew all about it, 'getting rid of husbands isn't so easy!'
'I beg your pardon'—Reeve spoke with much more gravity and a still greater competence—'there's every facility for it when the man's a proved brute and the woman an angel whom, for three years, he has not troubled himself so much as to look at.'
'Do you think,' Miss Hamer inquired, 'that, even for an angel, extreme intimacy with another angel—such another as you: angels of a feather flock together!—positively adds to the facility?'
Barton could perfectly meet her. 'It adds to the reason—that's what it adds to; and the reason is the facility. I only know one way,' he went on, 'of showing her I want to marry her. I can't show it by never going near her.'
'But need you also show Colonel Despard?'
'Colonel Despard doesn't care a rap!'
'He cares enough to have given her all this time nothing whatever—for divorcing him, if you mean that—to take hold of.'
'I do mean that,' Barton Reeve declared; 'and I must ask you to believe that I know what I'm talking about. He hates her enough for any perversity, but he has given her exactly what is necessary. Enough's as good as a feast!'
Miss Hamer looked away—looked now at the clock; but it was none the less apparent that she understood. 'Well—she of course has a horror of that. I mean of doing anything herself.'
'Then why does she go so far?'
Margaret still looked at the clock. 'So far———?'
'With me, month after month, in every sort of way!'
Moving away from the fire, she gave him an irrelevant smile. 'Though I am to be alone, my time's up.'
He kept his eyes on her. 'Women don't feed for themselves, but they do dress, eh?'
'I must go to my room.'
'But that isn't an answer to my question.'
She thought a moment. 'About poor Kate's going so far? I thought your complaint was of her not going far enough.'
'It all depends,' said Reeve, impatiently, 'upon her having some truth in her. She shouldn't do what she does if she doesn't care for me.'
'She does care for you,' said the girl.
'Well then, damn it, she should do much more!'
Miss Hamer put out her hand. 'Good-bye. I'll speak to her.'
Reeve held her fast. 'She does care for me?'
She hesitated but an instant. 'Far too much. It's excessively awkward.'
He still detained her, pressing her with his sincerity, almost with his crudity. 'That's exactly why I've come to you.' Then he risked: 'You know———!' But he faltered.
'I know what?'
'Why, what it is.'
She threw back her head, releasing herself. 'To be impertinent? Never!' She fairly left him—the man was in the hall to let him out; and he walked away with a sense not diminished, on the whole, of how viciously fate had seasoned his draught. Yet he believed Margaret Hamer would speak for him. She had a kind of nobleness.