Chapter XV

In the evening a remark Denis let fall seemed to point to the fact that he had been thinking a good deal of the unfortunate scene poor Amy had made that morning. They were sitting together--Rusk and the boy--in the study. It was about nine o’clock, and the blinds were drawn down, and the lamp was lit. Rusk was sitting in the armchair Amy had occupied. He was turning over the pages of a magazine. Denis was at the table, his books all round him, busy over some work for the next day. Rusk, whose interest was not very closely riveted to the article he was glancing at, had been watching him for some time, when the boy looked up and their eyes met. Denis pushed away his books and papers with a half-impatient gesture.

“Well, have you finished?” asked his tutor.

“Yes--for the time being.... I’ve been thinking----”

“Have you? What about?”

“About you,” said the boy unexpectedly, “about myself; about all of us. Don’t you think we’re very strange--taking the family as a whole?”

Rusk’s eyes dropped again to his magazine, a page of which he now turned. “I’m principally concerned with one member of the family,” he answered slowly. “Of course I think _him_ very strange.”

“Ah, but seriously,” said his pupil.

“Well?”

“Will you answer a question, if I ask it?”

He leaned his elbows on the table, and with his chin supported between his two thin brown hands, looked across fixedly at Rusk. Rusk turned round. The boy’s peculiar, sallow, intelligent, charming face was vividly revealed in the bright lamplight, and, as often before, he was struck by some hint of strangeness in it, that vaguely Oriental quality he had thought so odd when he had first seen him. His lips were slightly parted; the dark, coarse hair was ruffled where it had been pushed back from the forehead; the wide-set, narrow, slanting eyes were fixed intently upon his.

“It depends on the question,” Rusk threw out cautiously.

“You’re afraid then?”

“I’m afraid of you, certainly,” he laughed. “Especially when you look at me like that.”

The boy flung himself back in his chair. “No; but I’m in earnest,” he answered. “Supposing you had known about us--everything that you know now--would you have come to teach me?”

Rusk was still smiling. “Yes,” he answered.

“Ah, you’re a humbug,” Denis grunted, giving him up. “There’s no getting at what you think.... We _are_ queer, all the same,” he went on after a pause, as Rusk made no reply, “and I’m sure you think so, even if you won’t own up to it.”

Rusk laid down his magazine, still open, on a chair beside him. “But why do you want me to own up to it?” he asked, amused.

“Of course I _don’t_, if you’d rather not.” He was silent a moment. Then he went on again, but in a different tone. “Has it never occurred to you that Alfred, for instance, is very strange--a little depressing. He’s so complete, so invulnerable. I suppose there are other people like him, but----”

“But what?”

“His moral sense seems to be so strictly bounded by the law!... And then he’s so dull! I’m perfectly sure nobody in the world was ever interested in anything he ever said. If you consider that, it’s a little awful.”

“Why consider it then?” asked Rusk: but Denis was not to be put off. He got up and walked over to the hearth-rug, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the chimney-piece and facing his tutor.

“It’s all jolly fine,” he continued, “but I know him. I’ve seen him with his own friends, and I know them, too. They talk to him, and play cards with him, but they don’t like him. He bores them. He bores them nearly to death. Even when he’s telling them some of his tales he bores them. I wonder----”

“Well, what is it you wonder?”

“I wonder what becomes of people like that--when they begin to get old? That’s what I meant when I said he was depressing.”

“Where did you ever see him with his friends?” asked Rusk, quietly.

“I’ve seen them up here at the house. He has them up sometimes when papa is away. They’re a rather rum lot. They like to talk about horses, and prize-fighting, and--and love, of a sort. The last is their special subject. It’s never very far away. They keep hovering about it, and every now and again it crops up. It amuses them more than anything else does. You can see their faces lighting up when it is mentioned. It gives them ideas. It suggests any amount of stories. It is only Alfred who can make it dull.” He brought this speech out with a kind of elderly cynicism that had the oddest effect when taken with the youthfulness and boyish charm of his face.

“And were you always present when these discussions took place?” inquired Rusk. He knew Alfred’s type, and could imagine the rest.

“No; not always: now and then. It would have been rather difficult not to have been, for they began immediately after dinner--just as soon as the coast was clear. They’re really awfully indecent: they’re so--so crude! But I liked to watch their faces. You can get at a good deal by watching people’s faces. You can see just what they are interested in, what they really think amusing, and what they think very deep, and what only bores them.”

“Ah, you’re too clever to live,” said Rusk, smiling.

Denis looked at him for a moment or two without speaking. “And then there’s papa----” he began thoughtfully.

“But my dear fellow, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you discussing your entire family,” Rusk interrupted. “Doesn’t it strike you that it’s hardly the thing to do--with me.”

“I’ll not do it if you don’t want me to. But why can’t I talk to you? You are the only person I _can_ talk to.”

“You may talk about anything else you like. After all you are scarcely in a position to criticize your people. They’re all a good deal older than you, you know, especially your father.”

“And I’m not to say anything about what happened here to-day?”

“Not the least little word. It’s none of your business.”

“It is my business,” cried Denis, with a sudden and unexpected indignation in his voice. “It is my business if I have to put up with it. I hate it. It’s not fair to you.”

Rusk blushed crimson. “Oh, I can look after myself,” he interposed hastily.

The boy turned his back and stood with one foot resting on the fender, gazing into the black, dead grate. “I’m awfully sorry,” he muttered almost inaudibly.

“Would you like a game of chess?” asked Rusk, changing the subject, and speaking in a tone of exaggerated naturalness, “or would you care to go for a stroll before bedtime?”

Denis shook his head. “No: I don’t want to disturb you. You’re reading. I’ve said all I’ve got to say. I know you know what I mean.”

He went back to the table and began to work again, but his tutor, giving him a sidelong glance from time to time, could see that his mind was not very deeply engaged by the task he had taken up. So he had wanted to apologize! Rusk was sorry that he should have taken this matter of Amy’s silliness to heart. After all it was infinitely unimportant, and certainly he himself was not inclined to give it more consideration than it was worth. A rather childish outburst of rudeness and ill-temper, having its origin in a very easily wounded vanity--that was about what it amounted to. Amy was certainly crude, but was there anything very new about that? She had always been crude, and would, doubtless, always continue to be so. The only thing that was really a nuisance was that Denis seemed to have noticed her feeling towards him, and the fact that she could hardly be said to have tried to disguise it. This was unfortunate, and he wondered if it was equally obvious to everybody. He had an unpleasant sense that it probably was, and it reminded him of an episode of his knickerbocker days, when he had been publicly kissed at a party by an affectionate little girl. He had not responded to that particular demonstration, which had indeed only been rendered possible by some foolish game they had been playing, and he did not feel inclined to respond to this one now. Nor was he in the least flattered by it. His personal vanity was slight and did not lead him to picture Amy’s passion as a very profound one, though it might make him look supremely ridiculous.

“Come,” he said to Denis, “you’re not really working. We may as well go out for half an hour.” He walked over to the window and drew aside the blind. “It’s a beautiful night. Shall we go?”

The boy pushed back his chair. “If you like.”

He followed his tutor from the room, and they went out into the garden. They walked slowly and in silence over the lawn down toward the gate. The night was warm, a little close even. From time to time a flash of distant lightning threw for a moment into vivid distinctness every leaf and twig hanging absolutely motionless in the still air. Then, while they moved slowly on, like a lamp of gold swinging under a deep vaulted roof, the orange moon floated out from behind a cloud. In its misty light the grass was soft and dim and faded as some old tapestry, and the garden behind them was a well of deepening shadow. A bat flew past, the noise of its leathery wings distinctly audible in the stillness. The quiet trees were delicate and vague against the paler sky, and a falling grace of weariness had drawn the whole world closer to a dream.

Rusk drew his pupil’s arm beneath his own. “What is the matter?” he asked kindly. “Why do you bother about things that are of no importance?”

“I suppose it is my nature,” said Denis. “You are so good, so nice, that I hate anyone to be rude to you.”

There was something in his voice that touched the young Englishman deeply, that made him suddenly more serious. “It is you who are nice,” he answered unaffectedly. “You have always been so--from the first day I came.”

He felt his pupil’s hand tighten ever so little on his arm. He knew that what he had said had pleased him.

“If I have been,” said Denis shyly, “it is because I like you--more than you know perhaps--more than I have ever cared for anybody else--much more.”

Rusk answered nothing. There was no particularly appropriate remark to make, so he kept silent. Through the dusk the red glow of his cigarette came and went.

“You do not mind?” asked Denis presently.

“Mind?” repeated Rusk in surprise.

“My having said that.”

“It gave me great pleasure,” replied Rusk simply.

The boy looked up at him and smiled. “I wanted to tell you before--a good many times--but I didn’t like to. I wanted you to know, awfully, but somehow it was hard to say--I don’t know why.”

“I think I did know,” said Rusk.

“Well, it is better like that, isn’t it?”

“Much better.”

They had reached the gate, and they passed out on to the road. They walked a short distance and then turned back. They walked in silence, and the silence all round them was broken only by the noise of their footsteps as they moved on through the lonely, listening night. A strange sense of dreaming had crept over Rusk. He seemed to have drifted back into some old forgotten life that had been washed up to him again from the deep mysterious sea of time. Presently the lighted windows of the house came once more into view. They slackened their pace a little, but still continued on their way.

Denis felt happy, though there was a melancholy mingled with his happiness. There nearly always was. Never before had he felt himself so close to his friend, yet oddly enough what hovered in the background of it all was an infinite sense of loneliness, of some mysterious longing that would never be satisfied, of the impossibility of knowing even for a moment anything save the few sad or happy impressions that passed through his own mind. He seemed to be moving in a dark shadowy garden from which there was no discoverable way out, a place all dim secluded glades and dimmer walks shut in by high interlacing hedges, so that he could only see the solitary path he followed himself, and, now and then, as to-night, catch a faint sound or a swift gleam, showing that he was not quite alone there, that there was something or someone else moving in the distance, and at times seeming to approach, but always instead, in the end, only to pass out of sight.

He did not know why, but he felt that that was his life. Perhaps with others it was different--yet he hardly saw how it could be.... Only, they didn’t seem to mind, and he--he....

In the sudden light of the hall Rusk, glancing at him, thought he looked unusually pale and tired. He sent him off to bed there and then.