Chapter XXV: The Tug-Of-War

Chris looked very white and thin, but just as smart as ever, and completely unsubdued in spirit and intention, when he called in Connaught Square one afternoon late in May, and found Gay in.

She looks prettier than ever, he thought, if less rounded than of yore, and if he had expressed sorrow at causing her so much pain, Gay's tender heart would instantly have melted, but for all his delight at seeing her, his evident determination to treat his accident as a trifle not worth talking about, put her back up to begin with. And when he unblushingly asked her to condole with him on the number of good things he had missed, and roundly abused the Professor and his understudy, for refusing him permission to ride with an arm strapped to his side, Gay's patience gave way utterly, and the first little rift within the lute made itself known.

Poor Chris felt that coldness in the air, but had not the key to the puzzle, and he could not make Gay out. Instead of the jolly little girl, eager to hear all about his stable, to discuss his horses, his hopes and future chances, to buck him up as she had so often done when things went wrong, she did not seem to have a word to throw to him except about trivial matters that didn't in the least interest him--or her, formerly.

How could he tell that those moments in which she saw his colours closed in by a mêlée of struggling horses and men, had changed her from a careless, happy-go-lucky girl, who laughed at accidents, had scarcely flung a fear even to death, to a thoughtful woman whose outlook on life would never again be quite the same? In a word, what he did before had not mattered, but now that she knew she loved him, it _did_, yet this solution never occurred to him, nor was there anything in her manner to suggest it--quite the reverse, in fact.

He asked her a few questions about her horses, and what they had done lately, as the papers did not always chronicle their doings, and she told him of their failures and successes, quite without enthusiasm, and Chris came to the conclusion that experience and Rensslaer combined, had put her off Trotting. And if she did not tell him that her horses were entered for no more fixtures after the end of June, and that her brief connection with Trotting would altogether cease on her return from abroad, Chris saw, clearly enough, that she took no more interest in the sport into which she had so light-heartedly plunged, than she did in his.

If hitherto Gay's life had been regulated by a warm heart, high spirits, and quick wits, he knew that it was so no longer, and resented the change in her. Sunbeams might not fulfil any recognised place in the scheme of creation, but they were delightful all the same, and he had been quite satisfied with her as she was. If he had only known it, she loved him at that moment more than ever, realising now she was with him, how completely he had spoiled her for everyone else, that he was the one companion of whom she never tired, never could tire.

"Frank and I are going abroad early in July," she said presently, and Chris's face lengthened. Steeplechasing was over for the year, and until he began to train his horses at the end of August, there was only the flat racing he despised, very seldom took the trouble to look at--and now Gay, on whose precious company he had counted, was going away in a little more than a month.

"I shan't be riding again till autumn, worse luck," he said. "And I'm too late for Olympia."

Gay looked at him, half-angry, half-reluctantly admiring--here he was, a mere gaunt shadow of himself, after the worst outing he had ever had, with only one longing--to court another!

Chris was very sensitive, and his hatred of talking about himself was only equalled by his horror of being a bore. So although the change in her manner hurt him more than either he or she knew, he abruptly changed the subject.

"You'll let me escort you to your meetings now, with Lossie, of course," he added grudgingly. "Tom Bulteel will be jolly glad to be off duty, I expect."

"And Effie too," said Gay candidly. "She did detest coming with me so, but they both played up splendidly, even if Tom's temper has been perfectly horrid."

"And where is this wonderful Gold Vase?" said Chris, looking at the centre of the carpet as if he expected to see it installed there as tutelary god.

"Oh, I hate it!" cried poor Gay, with tears in her voice. "It's covered over with a piece of sackcloth--I mean silk--in my den. It was won by a fraud--paid for with Carlton's good name--the great mistake was his thinking I'd value anything bought at such a cost."

"He never expected that brute to follow him up and see the toe-weights trick," said Chris consolingly. "Honest men can't play the rogue, and that's about all there is to it. Heard from him lately?"

"He is doing a cure at Aix--for the sake of the scenery, you know!" she laughed. "I have had some cheerful, gossiping letters from him," and Chris nodded carelessly, as at a matter of no interest to either. Mackrell had played the fool, and must take the consequences.

Then there was a horrid pause--a pause between these two who usually chattered like magpies when they got together!

"I made a scrap-book out of the snapshots and sketches of you," said Chris, rather gravely. "By a moderate computation there are somewhere about thirty, and I divided them into groups--the decent"--he hesitated--"the--not nice--and the positively libellous."

Gay coloured warmly. If her escapade had brought her a _succès de scandal_, caused her to be surrounded wherever she went in public, and make acquaintances faster than she wanted, she knew well enough the subtle difference in men's manners towards her, since she had courted publicity.

"It wasn't such a very awful thing to do, really," she said, with a rebellious toss of her red-brown head. "It was only those spiteful wretches made it _look_ bad."

"I'd rather see a picture of you as you look now," said Chris quietly, and Gay blushed again, the gentlest of reproofs always hit her hard.

"You see, Chris," she said earnestly, "I had always _longed_ to drive myself--I had had two trial spins in private--and when I saw my driver was tight at the critical moment, of course I ought to have asked Mr. Rensslaer to take his place, but the temptation was too irresistible, and, of course, I fell."

"So, apparently, did one of the competitors," said Chris; "broke an arm or leg, didn't he? So, you see, Trotting people can have accidents as well as jockeys."

Gay reluctantly admitted the fact.

"Of course," she said, "such a fall may be anything from a scratched face up to being killed--one of Mr. Rensslaer's drivers had just such a fall, not from hobbles, but from the track being badly made, and the man did not hurt himself a bit, but he has known a man killed by it. Still, you may say that of every sport. Take hunting--"

"Oh, Lord," cried Chris, "don't compare our national pastime with Trotting, please!"

But Gay affected not to hear. "I can quite understand a man being fond of riding, or even of 'riding jolly,'" she said severely. "Our forefathers did--and on considerably more jumping powder than in these almost Spartan days--and it must be a lovely feeling that everything is plain sailing, that neither you nor your horse are capable of making a mistake--in that heavenly state of mind you do remarkable things over and over again that you never could do in cold blood--but that is quite a different thing to steeplechasing!"

"Quite," agreed Chris in a tone that made Gay turn away indignantly, thinking of Carlton, and what he had not hesitated to do for her. Yes, Chris was certainly doing his best to throw her into his absent rival's arms, while on the other hand he was cut to the heart by her reception of him, so utterly different to the one for which during long weeks of pain he had longed.

Unconsciously, he had looked for a little of that "mothering" that the best kind of woman knows how to give the man she loves, when in trouble, but Chris's pride was more than equal to his tenderness of heart, and he gave no sign of his wound.

"Mr. Rensslaer has asked us over to his place at Vienna--he is going to let me drive one of his Trotters for him. After all," cried Gay, becoming only the more rebellious under Chris's grave looks--Chris the gay-hearted, whom she had confidently reckoned on to think her right whatever she did--"why should a thing that is right in Vienna, be wrong in England?"

"In Rome," murmured Chris vaguely, "you must do as the 'Rum-uns' do."

"Oh," cried Gay impatiently, "we know that vice and virtue are matters of climate and colour, that what is right in the east, is wrong in the west, and it's the same with Trotting--if I am satirised in England, I shall make up for it in the encouragement and respect I shall get abroad!"

She jumped up, and fetched some large photographs that represented an attractive girl driving one of Rensslaer's trotters, and Chris mentally compared this modest presentment of a modest woman, in an elegant conveyance, with the fiendish cleverness of a sketch representing Gay perched upon a shining skeleton wagon, with a charming leg stretched along a shaft on either side of it.

"You're too good for it, Gay," he said, "either there or here. Rensslaer is right--there is no future for Trotting under present conditions in England."

Gay shrugged her shoulders, and abruptly, contemptuously even, changed the subject.

"I am looking forward tremendously to Olympia," she said, "aren't you?"

"I suppose the jumping will be all right. I hear the fences are to be very much higher than any seen before in other shows in England, that gentlemen are to ride instead of stable-boys, is good."

There was a note in his voice that made Gay sigh impatiently, and turn her head away; here was the ruling idea, strong in death, or what was very near it.

"Rensslaer must have his hands full," said Chris. "Awfully decent chap--he has looked me up several times." He did not say that he had encouraged him, as bringing news of Gay.

"Oh, he's delightful," said she as tea appeared, and she began to pour it out. "His naïveté, his tremendous natural ability, whether he's revolver-shooting, or writing a play, or modelling, or driving Trotters, or judging horses, or nursing a cat, or taking a lot of trouble about a silly girl like me and my stupid fancies, there's no one like him!"

But Chris was not jealous, though some men might have misunderstood Gay's intense admiration of Rensslaer's genius and many-sidedness, and the pleasure his friendship had clearly brought into her life.

"You know the papers have engaged you to him?" he said, and thought of an extremely uncomplimentary snapshot of Rensslaer, crouched low on his seat, and made ferocious by his huge goggles, published in the papers side by side with Gay.

"Why?" she said incredulously. "Do you suppose that a man like that would care for a silly little ignoramus like me?"

"Men hate brains," said Chris grumpily, and his temper was not improved by being told that it was only _boys_ who did.

"He wants you to go down to Elsinore," said Gay. "Oh, Chris, the peace of that great quadrangle--the luxury of those stables that yet compass the most perfect simplicity of service to those beautiful creatures--you'll be like a boy in a sweet-shop, running about from one joy to another and loth to leave any. To run through his hundred or so of horses, will take you approximately, I should say, a year of undulterated bliss!"

"I don't know that his stable will interest me so much," objected Chris. "You see, he doesn't go in for steeplechasing--it's driving he's great at."

"Why, he _loves_ his horses," cried Gay indignantly. "It's his humanising influence in the stable--loving the dear beasts, not for what they do, and the money to be made out of them, but for what they _are_--that's so lovely."

Chris sighed. To love horses, and live among the world's pick of them as Rensslaer did, was a lot that the most fortunate man alive might envy.

"Chris?"

"Yes?"

"Aunt Lavinia has been a great comfort to me while you were laid up." Chris smiled--it was a sign of grace in her that she had need of comforting.

"I didn't know till she told me--how--how charitable you are. No wonder you're always hard up, when you give away most of your winnings in helping poor, wretched people!"

Chris coloured.

"I don't," he said. "Aunt Lavinia has been pulling your leg."

"Has it ever struck you that I am very selfish?" inquired Gay anxiously.

"Often--about not making me happy. And it would be so easy, and so--er--so pleasant," said Chris, with the lines that meant mischief wrinkling his young eyes.

"You know," said Gay hastily, "somehow my ambitions seem _common_ to me when I look at that dear little lady, who lives entirely for others, and I question my right to waste money as I do on Trotting and otherwise. Oh, I'm not a Socialist"--

"I should hope not," said Chris significantly. "It just means that you make another man work for you while you idle, and then curse him because he does not make enough to give you luxuries."

"Oh, I'm idle enough," said Gay remorsefully, "but I _do_ feel a burning desire to see the rich enjoy less, and the poor and unfortunate _suffer_ less, and I know perfectly well that I ought to sell my horses--

"They wouldn't fetch much," said Chris, chuckling unkindly. "But there's nothing I'd enjoy more than putting 'em up at Tattersall's--if they're good enough for Tat's."

Gay turned very white, and a flash like steel came into her grey eyes--few people had ever seen it, but it meant mischief.

"And I to see you put up yours," she said quietly. "When you drop racing, Chris, you may talk to me about Trotting--not before."

Chris too had turned very pale, he understood now. He was to tear out what was in the very blood and fibre of him--what had been in countless generations of his hard-riding, sporting forefathers...

"You ask me for my very life itself," he said heavily. "Even my mother never asked me that impossibility. She placed my deep happiness in riding before her own peace of mind always."

Yes, his mother had known how to love him better than that.... He must possess great qualities to love, and be so beloved by his mother, that their love went on, unbroken even by death. After all, Gay asked herself, was it not _she_ who was selfish, not he?

Had Chris but looked at her in that moment of insight, of revelation, each might have been spared much sorrow, but he was staring straight before him, his face set and stern at the _impasse_ to which he and Gay had come--he thought he knew now the real reason why she had refused him at the Ffolliott's dance.

At that pregnant moment the door opened slowly, and a timid face came round the corner, like a rabbit peering from a burrow; since Min Toplady's visit, the Professor always looked first to see if Lossie were there, before entering.

"Are you alone, my dear? Ah, only Chris, I see," and the Professor came forward, and shook his 'case's' hand warmly. If only the boy could be weaned from steeplechasing, there was no one he would like better for a brother-in-law, though of course it must be a long--a very long engagement.

"I wish," he said presently to Chris in his tactless way, "that you would persuade Gay to listen to reason, and give up Trotting."

"He had better get the whip-hand of _himself_ before he tries to manage others," cried Gay; then looking at Chris, white, wasted, invincible in his weakness, her heart was pierced with cruel pain. He looked like slipping through, without the help of any more accidents, and what would life be worth to her without him?

As she moved to the window, and stood looking out, she lived again those awful moments at Sandown, yet when she came back to the two men, her face told nothing, for if Chris had pluck, she had grit, and the latter wears best in the long run.

"Each to its own, Heron," she said--"you to your books and microscope, Chris to his racers, and I to my Trotters; there isn't a pin to choose between the selfishness of any one or us!"

And Chris, when presently he said good-bye, thought grimly that she was about right.