Chapter FIVE

She noted his sudden recoil, the almost horrified expression in his face, as she made this astounding confession.

Her voice had in it a vibrating note of reproach when she spoke again. “Surely, you do not think that of me? If I were what you seem to suppose, I could not look you in the face. Listen while I tell you a strange, an astonishing story, but a true one.”

Ashamed of himself for having so swiftly harbored evil thoughts, he composed himself to listen.

“I told you after I left boarding-school he found me a home with some friends of his, a married couple who, I fancy, were under considerable obligations to him. I was not at all happy there, and I suppose I could not help showing it when he came to see me. I did not take to either the husband or the wife, and they did not take to me. I saw from the first they did not want me, and I expect it was the fear of offending Mr. Quentin that made them hesitate to give a point-blank refusal to his suggestion. Perhaps also the want of money, for, I soon found out they were poor and making a brave show on very little. Anyway, we never hit it off together from the day I entered their house to the day I left it.”

And, at this point, Aylmer said the thing he might have been expected to say, and he said it with obvious sincerity.

“I am pretty certain the fault must have been on their side. It seems to me that any normal person could get on with you. You seem so even-tempered, so adaptable.”

She thanked him with a smile. “One is never a fair judge of oneself; still, I do not think I am difficult. If they had given me a little encouragement instead of keeping me always at arm’s length, I fancy I could have made myself fairly at home. Richard, I could see, began to have his suspicions of the state of affairs, and one day rather sternly bade me tell him the truth--was I happy or not?

“I hated to trouble him more than I could help, after his extraordinary kindness to me. But, that day I was in unusually low spirits and could not pretend. My answer was a flood of tears which it was impossible for me to restrain. He was very, very fond of me--chiefly, I think, for my mother’s sake--and he was deeply touched by my outburst of grief. He soothed me as a kind father might soothe a child, and assured me that my unhappiness should not continue. He would think it well over, and find some means of ending it. I must wait patiently for a few days while he was making up his mind as to what should be done. At the end of three days he paid me another visit, and made me a most remarkable proposition.”

“I should have guessed that he would have asked you to marry him,” interposed Aylmer. “In the case of a guardian and a young, attractive ward, that is often the solution of an awkward position.”

“Yes, I was prepared for that myself. And I was so wretched at the time that, frankly speaking, if he had asked me to marry him, I should have consented, although my feeling for him was of a strictly filial nature. But, apparently, no such idea recommended itself to him. He discussed the project of having me to live with him as his ward, or better still, his adopted daughter. He did not favor this scheme, foresaw that it would give rise to all sorts of gossip and uncharitable comment.

“He alluded to the subject of marriage in a very delicate sort of way, saying that even if I were willing to overlook the disparity in our ages and make what must be, under the circumstances, an experiment of the most hazardous kind, he felt it would be his duty to protect me from any such rash impulse. For himself, there never had been but one woman in the world he wanted to marry, and she would not have him. That, of course, was my dear mother. As her heart had been buried in her husband’s grave, so his was buried in hers. He could never give to any other the love he had given to her.”

She paused for a second, and Aylmer could find nothing to say. Surely, from what he could guess was coming, there had never been a more extraordinary situation. The girl would have taken him for a husband; but, although he loved her in his own way, the man would not take her for a wife.

“There was, he concluded, only one feasible solution for the difficulty, one from which, when he first suggested it, I frankly recoiled. It was that we should present ourselves to the world as husband and wife. Nobody would know that our real relations were those of guardian and ward. In this way he would have a right to protect me, and the tongue of scandal would be effectually silenced.”

At that moment it seemed that her companion was on the point of interrupting. She apparently divined the nature of the comment to which he was about to give utterance, and she went on swiftly, as if in answer to it.

“Of course, if we had been ordinary people with plenty of friends and acquaintances, it would have been almost impossible to carry out such a project unless we actually had gone through the ceremony of marriage. But, in our case, the difficulty was removed by the fact that both of us led a life of singular isolation. I had no friends at all, my dear mother having carefully secluded me from the companionship of any of the people she knew in her adopted profession. I was estranged, through no fault of my own, from all my relations. I took no interest in them; they were entirely oblivious of even my existence.”

“I understand your position perfectly,” the young man said. “But was Mr. Quentin in an equally isolated state? Had he, like you, nobody to consider?”

“Strange as it may sound to you, he appeared to be equally alone in the world,” was the answer. “Ever since I have known him, he has been a singularly reticent man. Never to me, never to my mother, according to what she told me, has he divulged any details of his family, of his past history. All we knew was that he was a man of means who spent the greater part of his life in travel.”

“But your home is in England, is it not?” asked Aylmer, voicing his surprise. “Traveling abroad so much, he would pick up acquaintances about whom he would know as much, or rather as little, as they would know about him. But, surely, in his own country, he must have some intimates, like his friend Martyn, for instance.”

She shook her head emphatically. But, in spite of that action, it seemed to him there was just a shade of hesitation in her manner as she spoke. “He has just a very few old cronies who occasionally come to see him at Hampstead during the very short periods that we are in residence there. In a general way, he is averse to cultivating society, and he hates entertaining in his own house. He prefers this cosmopolitan life, and is content to consort for a brief space with birds of passage like himself.”

“And would you wish a different sort of existence? Or, are you as contented as he is?” asked Aylmer.

“I am not quite sure,” she said after a brief pause. “The constant flitting about has its bright side. One is hardly ever dull; there is always some sort of excitement in a continual change of scenes and people. But then I am very young yet. Later on, perhaps, I may feel the desire to settle down, to have a real home, a place you can look upon as a haven of peace.”

They walked on for a long time in silence. The young man was thinking swiftly, deeply, over the singular tale she had unfolded to him. Presently he spoke.

“And when you made this strange arrangement, did it ever occur to you that there might come a day when you might meet somebody you really cared for, when these extraordinary relations might become exceedingly irksome?”

A vivid blush overspread her face at this question.

“As I told you, at first I recoiled at the proposition. But he is a singularly persuasive man. He employed all his eloquence to overcome my reluctance, to prove to me it was the best way out of a most difficult situation. I don’t think, at the time, I probed very deeply into the future; I was too anxious to embrace any lot that promised me even moderate happiness. But, to do him justice, he was not unmindful of the contingency to which you have alluded.”

Aylmer heaved a sigh of relief. He had thought very hardly of Quentin for having taken advantage of the girl’s inexperience and unhappiness to lure her into a false and anomalous position, one which, in time, she might find to be insupportable. He hoped she had been left some chance of escape from such a bondage.

“Yes, he was very fair and considerate. He told me in the most delicate way that if the experiment did not result in my happiness, if in the course of time I came across one whom I really loved and who really loved me, he would put no obstacles in the way. On the contrary, he would do everything he could to smooth away the difficulties that would arise.”

A very singular man this Quentin, that was quite obvious, thought Aylmer. Still, it puzzled him why such a roundabout way should have been chosen. Granted that her living with him as his ward, or adopted daughter, might have given rise to scandalous comment, there were other methods by which he might have secured his object of providing for her. He was, apparently, a very well-off man; he could have made her an allowance sufficient to support herself, apart from him. This masquerading as man and wife seemed one of the very wildest of projects that could emanate from the brain of one who appeared to be perfectly sane and also a man of the world. The situation would be very difficult to explain convincingly to the most ardent lover, if such should come upon the scene later on. They might have no real friends who took any interest in their proceedings, but, in the course of their short nomadic life together they must have come across heaps of people to whom she was known as Mrs. Quentin, the supposed wife of a man old enough to be her father.

His thoughts were in such a whirl over this remarkable revelation that he found it difficult to collect them. The one thing that insistently presented itself to his mind was the fact that she was really a free woman, and that he was at liberty to woo her, if he chose.

“And you have told me all this,” he said at length, “because you have an instinct that some day you may want a friend. I do not wish to force your confidence in any way, but I should like to know if that instinct has some foundation in fact; in a word, that you are, even now, apprehending trouble of some kind.”

There was a long pause before she replied to him, and there seemed in her manner the same hesitation that he had noticed a little time before.

“I do not know if there is any foundation in fact. It is, I think, simply an instinct but one that I cannot reason myself out of.” She spoke a little incoherently. “I have told you because I trust you, and because you offered to be my friend.”

He spoke very seriously. “My dear Mrs. Quentin, again I repeat that I shall prove myself worthy of your trust.” He added with a boldness that surprised himself: “I shall always be a friend. But if you care to look a little closer you will find more than a friend.”

These expressive words seemed to arouse in her an intense agitation. Her bosom heaved; impulsively she laid her hand upon his arm, and, an almost piteous cry came from the lips that trembled with her emotion.

“Oh, no, please not now. I was afraid of that, or I think I should have made you my confidant sooner. We must remain just friends, firm and faithful friends.”

He looked at her long and searchingly. Was he mistaken, after all, in thinking that she had for him any warmer feeling than that of friendship? And yet, his friend Peyton, that shrewd observer, very plainly had hinted that she was not indifferent to him. She had told him she was a free woman. Why did she shrink from anything in the shape of an avowal on his part? Before that revelation, he would not have indulged in a hint of his feelings. But now there was no question of injury to the man who masqueraded as her husband.

“Do you mean that--?” he began in an agitated voice, but she did not allow him to complete his question.

“Oh, I beg of you not to press me further, not to question me.” Her tones, full of entreaty, were far from steady. “I am not mistress of myself, just now; you must have guessed what an effort it has cost me to make such a confession to you. Be content now with the knowledge that I esteem you more greatly than anybody I have ever met. I should make you very, very vain if I told you the high opinion I have formed of your character.”

“Must we always stop at friendship?” he asked gravely. “Is there no hope of anything warmer on your part?”

But to that question she would make no answer. She could only send him from her beautiful eyes that piteous and entreating look that forbade him to press her further.

And yet, although he was not naturally a very keen observer, certain things in her attitude, the depth of her agitation especially, seemed to suggest that she returned his affection, although her lips obstinately refused to confirm it. In spite of Quentin’s promise to release her from an intolerable situation, was she doubtful that he would keep his word when the crucial moment came? Or, was she thinking that, even if he kept faith with her, the difficulties of the new situation would still be very formidable?

She spoke presently in a lighter vein. “We shall not lose sight of each other as is usually the case in an acquaintance of the casual kind. We shall be going to England very shortly, and shall stay there for some little time. I am going to tell you a great secret, which you must be quite surprised at when you learn it from its proper source. Richard has made up his mind to ask you to visit us at our home at Hampstead; but, he is sure not to ask you till just before we say good-by here. Don’t let your manner betray that it is not the surprise he imagines.”

He gave her the required promise, while he meditated over the information she had given him. There seemed no limit to Quentin’s eccentricity. In England he was supposed to live the life of a recluse, shunning company and seeing none but a few old cronies. Yet, in a brief space, he had departed twice from his rules. He had asked Whitefield, an absolute stranger, to visit him, and now he was going to ask another stranger to be his guest. His conduct certainly was contradictory. What had he seen in either of these two men to arouse the desire of cultivating their society?

Of course he did not express these thoughts to her, but, he could not get them out of his mind. He would have liked dearly to have had Peyton’s alert young brain at work on this sudden change of front. But, of course, he could not take him into his confidence, as he could not betray the trust the beautiful young woman had reposed in him.

There was one point on which he was very curious--Did the ungenial Martyn know of this singular relation between the couple, or did he, like the rest, suppose them to be husband and wife in the ordinary meaning of that relationship?

He put the question bluntly to her, and her answer was that Martyn was not in the secret. She went even further than that in stating that nobody except himself understood the true nature of the situation. But, in spite of the strong fascination she exercised over him, he could not quite bring himself to believe her. There was a subtle something in her manner that roused his suspicions, that suggested there were certain things in which she did not intend to give him her complete confidence. He had an instinctive feeling that Martyn knew as much as he did himself. But after such an emphatic assurance, he felt it impossible to pursue the subject.

A later reference to that morning on which he had found her in tears did not lead to any satisfactory result. She treated the matter lightly, pretending there was really nothing in the incident, that she had happened to be in a somewhat hysterical mood, and had given way to an emotion that was not justified by anything that had taken place between her husband’s friend and herself.

One result of the confidential relations that so suddenly had been brought about was that, during the remainder of his stay at Ostend, Aylmer was a good deal more in her society. Martyn was still one of the party, but he continued to absent himself the greater part of the time. And Quentin seemed rather pleased than otherwise that his wife had found somebody who was ready always to keep her company when he was not disposed to be her escort.

On the night before the two young men left for England, Quentin took the opportunity, when alone with Aylmer, of inviting him to visit them later on in London.

“We shall be at Hampstead in about a month from now,” he told the young man. “And I will write to you as soon as we get there, and fix a day for you to come and dine.” He added, after a slight pause: “I hope that nice young fellow Peyton will not be offended if I don’t include him. But I think he is a bit too youthful for such an invitation to give him pleasure. And Eileen does not care for very young men.”

The next day he said good-by to the supposed husband and wife. His regret at parting with Eileen was tempered by the thought that he would soon be meeting her again. And this meeting would be independent of the invitation that Quentin had given him.

He was resolved to deliver her, by every means in his power, from this unnatural bondage, and to pursue this scheme, it would be necessary they should meet in secret. He had suggested this to her several times, and had been met by an agitated refusal. But, in the end, she had surrendered, and had promised to do what he asked.