The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Given Case/Chapter 3
III
Barton Reeve, of a Sunday, sometimes went for luncheon to his sister, who lived in Great Cumberland Place, and this particular Sunday was so fine that, from the Buckingham Palace Road, he walked across the Park. There, in the eastern quarter, he encountered many persons who appeared, on the return from church, to have assembled to meet each other and who had either disposed themselves on penny chairs or were passing to and fro near the Park Lane palings. The sitters looked at the walkers, the walkers at the sitters, and Barton Reeve, with his sharp eyes, at every one. Thus it was that he presently perceived, under a spreading tree, Miss Hamer and her sister, who, however, though in possession of chairs, were not otherwise engaged. He went straight up to them, and, while he stood talking, they were approached by another friend, an elderly intimate, as it seemed, of Mrs. Gorton's, whom he recognised as one of the persons so trying to his patience the day of his long wait in her drawing-room. Barton Reeve looked very hard at the younger lady, and was perfectly conscious of the effect he produced of always reminding her that there was a subject between them. He was, on the other hand, probably not aware of the publicity that his manner struck his alert young friend as conferring on this circumstance, nor of the degree in which, as an illustration of his intensity about his own interests, his candour appeared to her comic. What was comic, on his part, was the excessive frankness—clever man though he was—of his assumption that he finely, quite disinterestedly, extended their subject by this very looking of volumes. She and her affairs figured in them all, and there was a set of several in a row by the time that, laughing in spite of herself, she now said to him: 'Will you take me a little walk?' He left her in no doubt of his alacrity, and in a moment Mrs. Gorton's visitor was in her chair and our couple away from the company and out in the open.
'I want you to know,' the girl immediately began, 'that I've said what I could for you—that I say it whenever I can. But I've asked you to speak to me now just because you mustn't be under any illusion or flatter yourself that I'm doing———' she hesitated, for his attention had made her stop short—'well, what I'm not. I may as well tell you, at any rate,' she added, 'that I do maturely consider she cares for you. But what will you have? She's a woman of duty.'
'Duty? What do you mean by duty?'
Barton Reeve's irritation at this name had pierced the air with such a sound that Margaret Hamer looked about for a caution. But they were in an empty circle—a wide circle of smutty sheep. She showed a slight prevision of embarrassment—even of weariness: she had hoped for an absence of that. 'You know what I mean. What else is there to mean? I mean Colonel Despard.'
'Was it her duty to Colonel Despard to be as consciously charming to me as if there had been no such person alive? Has she explained to you that?' he demanded.
'She hasn't explained to me anything—I don't need it,' said the girl, with some spirit. 'I've only explained to her.'
'Well?'—he was almost peremptory.
She didn't mind it. 'Well, her excuse—for her false position, I mean—is really a perfectly good one.' Miss Hamer had been standing, but with this she walked on. 'She found she—what do you call it?—liked you.'
'Then what's the matter?'
'Why, that she didn't know how much you'd like her, how far you'd—what do you call it?—"go." It's odious to be talking of such things, I think,' she pursued; 'and I assure you I wouldn't do it for other people—for any one but you and her. It makes it all sound so vulgar. She didn't think you cared—on the contrary. Then when she began to see, she had got in too deep.'
'She had made my life impossible to me without her? She certainly has "got in" to that extent,' said Barton Reeve, 'and it's precisely my contention. Can you pretend for her that to have found out that she has done this leaves open to her, in common decency, any but the one course?'
'I don't pretend anything!' his companion replied with some confusion and still more impatience. 'I'm bound to say I don't see what responsibility you're trying to fix on me.'
He just cast about him, making little wild jerks with his stick. 'I'm not trying anything and you're awfully good to me. I dare say my predicament makes me a shocking bore—makes me, in fact, ridiculous. But I don't speak to you only because you're her friend—her friend, and therefore not indifferent to the benefit for her of what, take it altogether, I have to offer. It's because I feel so sure of how, in her place, you would generously, admirably take your own line.'
'Heaven forbid I should ever be in her place!' Margaret exclaimed with a laugh in which it pleased Reeve, at the moment, to discover a world of dissimulation.
'You're already there—I say, come!' the young man had it on his tongue's end to reply. But he stopped himself in time, and felt extraordinarily delicate and discreet. 'I don't say it's the easiest one in the world; but here I stand, after all—and I'm not supposed to be such an ass—ready to give her every conceivable assistance.' His friend, at this, replied nothing; but he presently spoke again. 'What has she invented, at Pickenham, to-day, but to keep me from coming?'
'Is Kate to-day at Pickenham?' Miss Hamer inquired.
Barton Reeve, in his acuteness, caught something in the question—an energy of profession of ignorance—in which he again saw depths. It presented Pickenham and whomsoever might be there as such a blank that he felt quite forced to say:
'I rather imagined—till I spied you just now—that you would have gone.'
'Well, you see I haven't.' With which our young lady paused again, turning on him more frankly. It struck him that, as from a conscious effort, she had a heightened colour. 'You must know far better than I what she feels, but I repeat it to you, once for all, as, the last time I saw her, she gave it me. I said just now she hadn't explained, but she did explain that.' The girl just faltered, but she brought it out. 'She can't divorce. And if she can't, you know, she can't!'
'I never heard such twaddle,' Barton Reeve declared. 'As if a woman with a husband who hates her so he would like to kill her couldn't obtain any freedom———!' And he gave such a passionate whirl of his stick that it flew straight away from him.
His companion waited till he had picked it up. 'Ah, but there's freedom and freedom.'
'She can do anything on all the wide earth she likes.' He had gone on as if not hearing her, and, lost in the vastness of his meaning, he absolutely glared awhile at the distance. 'But she's afraid!'
Miss Hamer, in her turn, stared at the way he sounded it; then she gave a vague laugh. 'How you say that!'
Barton Reeve said it again—said it with rage and scorn. 'She's afraid, she's afraid!'
Margaret continued to look at him; then she turned away. 'Yes—she is.'
'Well, who wouldn't be?' came to her, as a reply, across the grass. Mrs. Gorton, with two gentlemen, now rejoined them.