The two objects of Tilney’s contemplation had by this time settled themselves on the seat which their observer still chose to call his own, and something in their attitudes seemed to announce that theirs was no transient alighting, but the deliberate installation which precedes an earnest talk.
“Well, she could talk to anybody, at any hour of the day or night! That’s her trade, poor girl, as much as it is mine. Only I can’t see why she should give Magraw my particular hour. Now that I’ve given him such a good start they’ve plenty of other chances of meeting. But perhaps she’s afraid of competition, and wants to clinch the business by this morning interview. Poor girl! How she must hate it at heart! I’ll do her the justice to say that if she had enough to keep body and soul together she’d never look at a Magraw. But if this hand-to-mouth life is hard on a man it’s ten times worse for a woman—and her day is over sooner, too. Poor girl! No wonder she shrinks at the idea of growing old in such a trade. To see people cooling off, and the newcomers crowding her out—how can I blame her for being afraid to face such a future? Why, I ought to do what I can to help her—but to help her to Magraw! Bah—there’s something rotten in our social system; but it isn’t her fault, and only a primitive ass of a man would be fool enough to blame her, instead of pitying her as a fellow victim.”
At this point Miss Grantham started up with an apprehensive gesture with which Tilney was painfully familiar. “She’s had to look at her watch to realize how time was flying! She doesn’t seem to find it goes so slowly with Magraw. Perhaps my pity’s wasted, after all. That’s the way she always lingers on after she has said she couldn’t possibly stay another minute. Poor Magraw! She’s playing him for all she’s worth, and I don’t suppose he even knows he’s on the hook. Oh, I don’t blame her—not in the least!—only I think she might have chosen another place for their meetings. Hardened wretch as I am, I was beginning to have a sentiment for that bench—it would never have occurred to me to sit there with Miss Bixby, for instance. It’s queer how a woman’s taste deteriorates when she associates with common men—but I mean to let Miss Grantham know that, though she’s welcome to Magraw, she can’t have my bench into the bargain!”
By this time the couple under observation had completed their lingering adieux, the gentleman returning across the lawn to his house, while the lady retraced her way toward Cliffwood. Tilney remained in concealment while Mr. Magraw strode by within a few feet, the fatuous smile of self-complacency upon his lips; then the young man, emerging behind his patron’s back, struck across the lawn and overtook Miss Grantham as she turned into the adjoining grounds.
She paused as she became aware of Tilney’s approach, and cast a rapid glance in the direction from which he had come; but he had taken care not to show himself till Magraw had vanished in the shrubberies, and he was quick to note the look of reassurance in Miss Grantham’s eyes. She held out her hand, blushing slightly, but self-possessed.
“J’ai failli attendre!” she quoted with an indulgent smile; and the smile had well-nigh stung her companion to immediate retaliation. But he meditated a subtler revenge, and dissembling his resentment, asked innocently: “Have you been here long?”
“It has certainly seemed so,” she replied in the same tone.
“Well, at any rate, my involuntary delay has enabled you to enjoy what you originally came out to seek;” and, in reply to her puzzled glance, he added pointedly: “The pleasures of solitude.”
Unmoved by the thrust, she turned a smiling look on him. “But what if you have made them lose their flavor?”
“Then it was almost worth my while to have stayed away!”
She held out her hand. “The experiment was so successful that you need not try it again,” she said sweetly. “But time flies, and I must hasten back into captivity.”
He detained her hand to ask sentimentally: “I hope you are not losing your taste for freedom?” and she replied, as she hastened away: “Come and see—come and see to-morrow!”
He stood in the path where she had left him, and slowly drew from his pocket Mr. Magraw’s latest gift—a jeweled cigarette case. He took out the cigarettes, transferred them to his pocket, and then, with a free swing of the arm, flung their receptacle into the sea.
“Do you come and see to-morrow!” he muttered, addressing himself to Miss Grantham’s retreating figure; then he lit a cigarette, and walked rapidly back to Sea Lodge.
“I shouldn’t have thought it of her!” he said as he entered the house.
Part II.
IV.
Two mornings later Tilney, with a beating heart, descended the terrace of Sea Lodge, and once more directed himself toward the bench on the cliff.
He was not only on time, but a few minutes before the hour; yet it was something of a surprise to him to find the bench still untenanted. He seated himself, lit a cigarette with deliberation, and drew from his pocket a note stamped Cliffwood and bearing the date of the previous evening.
“Dear Mr. Tilney,”
it ran, “much as I dislike to intrude upon the solitude which I know you value so highly, I must ask you to spare me a few moments to-morrow morning; and I send this line in advance in order that my coming may not interfere with any other arrangements.
“Yours sincerely,
“Belle Grantham.”
Tilney re-read this note with an air of considerable complacency; then he laid it carefully back in his notecase, and rose to meet Miss Grantham as she made her appearance around the curve of the path.
The morning was chilly, and veiled in a slight haze, too translucent to be called a fog, but perceptible enough to cast a faint grayness over sea and sky. Seen in this tempered light, Miss Grantham’s face seemed to lose its usual vivacity and be subdued to the influence of the atmosphere; and her manner of greeting Tilney had the same tinge of soberness.
“I must excuse myself,” she began, “for again intruding on your privacy—”
“My privacy?” Tilney gallantly interposed. “Was it not long since understood between us that the privacy of this spot belongs as much to you as to me?”
“Long since—yes,” she replied; “but so much has happened in the interval.” She paused, and added in a significant tone: “Since I came here yesterday morning, and found you sitting on this bench with Sadie Bixby.”
Tilney feigned a successful show of embarrassment. “You came here yesterday morning—?”
“By appointment, as you evidently do not remember,” she continued coldly. “It is a mistake one does not make twice, and my only object in asking to see you this morning—”
“One moment,” Tilney interposed. “Before you go on, I must say in my own defense that I assumed our compact about the use of this seat had been abrogated when I came out the day before yesterday, and found you sharing it with Magraw.”
There was no mistaking the effect of this thrust. Her color rose painfully, and she forced a laugh as she replied: “The day before yesterday? Ah, yes—that was the morning you were so late. Mr. Magraw saw me from the house, and took pity on my deserted state.”
Tilney colored also at this fresh evidence of her duplicity.
“I beg your pardon—but does not your memory deceive you? It seemed to me that Magraw was waiting on the bench, and that it was you who took pity—if I am not mistaken.”
She drew herself up and flashed an outraged glance at him. “You were watching us, then?” she exclaimed.
“Oh—watching! I was merely repairing to our seat at my usual hour.”
“At your usual hour? But Mr. Magraw told me you were not coming—that you would be busy all the morning with some writing—” She broke off, seeing herself more deeply involved with each word.
“Some writing he had given me to do? Precisely,” Tilney answered with scorn. “Only, he had underrated either my impatience to see you, or my head for figures—or both.”
She received this in an embarrassed silence, and softened by her embarrassment he
added: “It is not for me to discuss your arrangements; but I confess I wondered a little that you chose our bench as a meeting-place.”
She hesitated a moment, and then said in a deprecating tone: “It is the only place where I can see anyone alone!”
“And you wished to see Magraw alone?”
Their eyes met defiantly, but hers fell first as she answered: “Yes—I did wish to.”
Tilney bowed ceremoniously. “In that case, of course, nothing remains to be said.”
They had both remained standing during this short colloquy, but she now seated herself and signed to him to do the same.
“Yes—something remains for me to say; and it was for the purpose of saying it that I asked you to meet me this morning.”
Tilney, without replying, placed himself at the opposite end of the bench.
“What I wish to ask,” she continued in a decisive tone, “is your object in meeting Miss Bixby here yesterday.”
The temerity of the question was so surprising to her companion that for a moment he gazed at her without speaking; then he replied with a faint smile: “If there is any right of priority in such inquiries, perhaps I am entitled to ask first what was your object in meeting Magraw here the day before that.”
She repressed her impatience, and returned gently: “The cases are surely not quite alike; but I thought I had already given you my answer.”
“That you wished to see him alone? Well, I had the same object in asking Miss Bixby to meet me.”
“But you must see that in the case of a young girl—especially a girl as inexperienced as Sadie—”
Tilney raised his hand with a deprecating gesture. “Are you not falling into the conventional mistake of assuming that a man cannot seek to be alone with a young girl except for the purpose of making love to her?”
“Well, what other purpose—?”
He looked at her calmly. “Then it was to promote that purpose that you asked Magraw to meet you here the day before I met Miss Bixby?”
It was Miss Grantham’s turn to color, and she fulfilled the obligation handsomely. “I see no object in such cross-questioning—”
“Ah, pardon me, but it was you who began it.”
“It was my duty to question you about Sadie. You can’t imagine I do it for my pleasure—but her parents are too inexperienced to protect her.”
“To protect her? Then you consider me hopelessly detrimental—?”
Miss Grantham drew a quick breath. “Why not have told me at once that you wished to marry her? Every one is saying so, of course; but I could not help remembering that your intentions have not always been so—”
“Specific?” he suggested ironically.
“Well, you are still unmarried,” she observed.
“Yes,” he said musingly. “It takes a pretty varied experience of life to find out that there are worse states than marriage.”
Miss Grantham rose with a smile. “Since you have found it out,” she said generously, “I can congratulate you with perfect sincerity. Sadie is a dear little creature—”
“But too good for me? Is that what you meant to add?”
“No, for when you find out how good she is you’ll want to be worthy of her.”
He received this in silence, but when she held out her hand for good-by he said: “I wonder if it’s not my duty to protect Magraw? He hasn’t even an inexperienced parent.”
She met his smile steadily, but he felt the sudden resistance of her hand. “Mr. Magraw,” she returned, withdrawing it, “would be quite safe if Sadie were.”
“If Sadie—?”
She broke into a laugh. “If you’re planning to take the bread out of my mouth, I must do something in the way of self-preservation.” And as he remained silent, feeling a rather tragic import under her pleasantry, she added wearily: “I can’t begin this kind of thing over again—I simply can’t!”
Tilney’s discouraged gesture showed his comprehension of her words. “To whom do you say it?” he exclaimed.
“Well, then, let us drop phrases, and admit frankly that we’re trying to marry each other’s wards—or whatever you choose to call them!”
He did not answer, and she continued, with a kind of nervous animation: “And that we’ll do all we can—that we honorably can—to help each other’s plans, and see each other through.”
The young man still remained silent, his eyes absently fixed on the line of sea from which the veil of mist was gradually receding; and before he had found a reply a footman, hastening across the lawn from the house, broke in upon his meditations.
“Beg pardon, sir, but Mr. Magraw wishes you to come in immediately, sir, to answer the telephone for him.”
Tilney turned abruptly toward his companion. “By heaven, yes, we’ll see each other through!” he exclaimed.
Though Tilney and Miss Grantham had parted without any reference to future meetings at the same spot, each was now drawn to the bench on the cliffs by a new motive—the not unpardonable desire to see if the other had again extended its hospitality to a third party.
Their mutual reconnoitering did not, for several mornings, carry them farther than the most distant point from which the bench was visible; when, perceiving it to be untenanted, they respectively retreated, without having discovered each other’s manoeuvre.
The fifth day, however, was so foggy that distant espionage was impossible; and Tilney’s suspicions having been aroused by the unusual amount of correspondence with which his patron had burdened him overnight, he determined to ascertain by direct inspection if the sanctity of the bench had again been violated. It would have been hard to say why, in his own thoughts, he still applied such terms to the possibility of Miss Grantham’s resorting to the spot in company with her suitor. Tilney fully acquiesced in the inevitableness of the course they had agreed upon; but if his reason accepted the consequences, his sensibilities made the process unpleasant to contemplate. He would have been prepared to append his signature to a matrimonial contract drawn up between Miss Grantham and his employer; but it irritated him that an arrangement so purely utilitarian should be disguised under the charming futilities of courtship.
“The real grossness is not in viewing marriage as a business partnership, but in pretending that one doesn’t,” he summed up, as he crossed the damp lawn with the waves of gray fog coiling around him like a phantom sea.
Through their pale surges he could just discern, as he approached the bench, an indeterminate outline hovering near it; and the outline proclaiming itself, on nearer inspection, as of his own sex, Tilney was about to turn aside when another figure appeared from the direction of Cliffwood.
“It’s odd,” he mused, trying to philosophize upon his own discomfiture—”it’s odd how the fog distorts a silhouette. I could have sworn I should have known hers anywhere, and yet this deceptive vapor—or my nerves, or the two together—make her look so much shorter—and I’ll swear I never saw her swing her arm as she walked. I suppose it comes from associating with a bounder like—”
He drew back with a suppressed exclamation as the small feminine outline showed more clearly through a partial break in the fog.
“Why, it looks—no, it can’t be! Hanged if I know, she’s so bundled up. Well, it’s not she, at any rate; and if Magraw, at this stage of the proceedings, has the indecency to be meeting other women here, it’s almost my duty to the poor girl to let her know before it’s too late to break with him.”
He was surprised at the immediate sense of lightness which this conclusion produced in him. He was sorry for Miss Grantham, of course, when she’d so nearly landed her man; but, hang it, there were as good fish in the sea—and meanwhile she must, at all costs, be saved from the humiliation of committing herself farther. His first impulse had been the somewhat cruel one of putting the unvarnished facts before her; but farther reflection made him shrink from this course, and cast about for some more humane expedient.
“If she could only be made to think that she can
do better than Magraw—and she ought to, with half a chance, poor child! I can’t be wholly sorry that she should not be sacrificed to this particular monster—not that Magraw’s not a good fellow in himself; I daresay the Minotaur was liked in his own set—but he should have stayed there, that’s all.”
While engaged in these considerations, Tilney had prudently withdrawn into the Cliffwood shrubberies; and he was just deciding to effect his escape through the Bixbys’ grounds, rather than run the chance of being discovered by the tenants of the bench, when, on issuing from his retreat, he beheld the indistinct gleam of a white dress half way down the Cliffwood lawn. This time, even though the fog had thickened, there was no mistaking the form and movement of the shrouded figure; or was it some subtler sense than that of sight that so positively assured him of Miss Grantham’s nearness? At any rate, he advanced to meet her without a moment’s hesitation, determined to protect her, by whatever expedient, from the embarrassment of interrupting the colloquy on the bench. He had but a moment in which to consider how this should be effected; but it was not the first time he had trusted to his gift of improvisation in delicate situations, and he was now sustained by the unwonted sense of his complete disinterestedness. The progress of his own affairs had in fact made it impossible for him to interfere from personal motives; and he thus had the support of knowing that his intervention was quite unaffected by selfish considerations.
“I’m almost glad,” he reflected, “that I am committed, if one of the first consequences is to enable me to act as her friend, without any afterthought, or any possibility of her suspecting me of not playing fair. One of my reasons for wanting to settle my own future has always been the desire to help her; and little Sadie is far too good a girl not to understand—”
At this point he found himself face to face with Miss Grantham, who, suddenly discerning him through the fog, drew back with a slight start of surprise.
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