第28章

I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed for me upon Armour's affairs to myself.The whole thing considered in connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too derogatory and disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury in the mere statement.But there came a point when I could no longer listen to Dora Harris's theories to account for him, wild idealizations as most of them were of any man's circumstances and intentions.'Why don't you ask him point-blank?'

I said, and she replied, frowning slightly, 'Oh, I couldn't do that.

It would destroy something--I don't know what, but something valuable--between us.' This struck me as an exaggeration, considering how far, by that time, they must have progressed towards intimacy, and my mouth was opened.She heard me without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished.The touch of comedy I gave the whole thing--surely I was justified in that!--fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of rebuke; one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor devil.

At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she turned a calm, considering eye upon me.

'You have known this for a fortnight?' she asked.'That doesn't seem somehow quite fair.'

'To whom?' I asked, and her answer startled me.

'To either of us,' she said.

How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine, but the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.

'Oh, confound it!' I exclaimed.'I couldn't help finding out, you know.'

'But you could help keeping it to yourself in that--in that base way,' she replied, and almost--the evening light was beginning to glimmer uncertainly through the deodars--I could swear I saw the flash of a tear on her eyelid.

'I beg your pardon,' she went on a moment later, 'but I do hate having to pity him.It's intolerable--that.'

I picked up a dainty edition of Aucassin and Nicolette with the intention of getting upon ground less emotional, and observed on the flyleaf 'D.H.from I.A.In memory of the Hill of Stars.' I looked appreciatively at the binding, and as soon as possible put it down.

'He was not bound to tell me,' Dora asserted presently, in reply to my statement that the mare had somehow picked up a nail in the stable, and was laid up.

'You have been very good to him,' I said.'I think he was.'

'His reticence was due,' she continued, as if defying contradiction, 'to a simple dislike to bore one with his personal affairs.'

'Was it?' I assented.My tone acknowledged with all humility that she was likely to know, and I did not deserve her doubtful glance.

'He could not certainly,' she went on, with firmer decision, 'have been in the least ashamed of his connection with Kauffer.'

'He comes from a country where social distinctions are less sharp than they are in this idiotic place,' I observed.

'Oh, if you think it is from any lack of recognition! His sensitiveness is beyond reason.He has met two or three men in the Military Department here--he was aware of the nicest shade of their patronage.But he does not care.To him life is more than a clerkship.He sees all round people like that.They are only figures in the landscape.'

'Then,' I said, 'he is not at all concerned that nobody in this Capua of ours knows him, or cares anything about him, or has bought a scrap of his work, except our two selves.'

'That's a different matter.I have tried to rouse in him the feeling that it would be as well to be appreciated, even in Simla, and I think I've succeeded.He said, after those two men had gone away on Sunday, that he thought a certain reputation in the place where he lived would help anybody in his work.'

'On Sunday? Do you mean between twelve and two?'

'Yes, he came and made a formal call.There was no reason why he shouldn't.'

'Now that I think of it,' I rejoined, 'he shot a card on me too, at the Club.I was a little surprised.We didn't seem somehow to be on those terms.One doesn't readily associate him with any conventionality.'

'There's no reason why he shouldn't,' said Dora again, and with this vague comment we spoke of something else, both of us, I think, a little disquieted and dissatisfied that he had.

'I think,' Dora said as I went away, 'that you had better go up to the studio and tell him what you have told me.Perhaps it doesn't matter much, but I can't bear the thought of his not knowing.'

'Come to Kauffer's in the morning and see the pictures,' I urged;but she turned away, 'Oh, not with you.'

I found my way almost at once to Amy Villa, not only because I had been told to go there.I wanted, myself, certain satisfactions.