CONSCIOUS of the importance of not letting his nervousness show, he had no sooner pointlessly risen than he took possession of another chair. He dropped the question of Effie’s security, remembering there was a prior one as to which he had still to justify himself. He brought it back with an air of indulgence which scarcely disguised, however, its present air of irrelevance. “ I’ll gladly call you, my dear Rose, anything you like, but you mustn’t think I’ve been capricious or disloyal. I addressed you of old at the last in the way in which it seemed most natural to address so close a friend of my wife’s. But I somehow think of you here now rather as a friend of my own.”
“And that makes me so much more distant? ” Rose asked, twirling her parasol.
Tony, whose plea had been quite extemporised, felt a slight confusion, which his laugh but inadequately covered. “I seem to have uttered a betise but I haven’t. I only mean that a different title belongs, somehow, to a different character.”
“I don’t admit his character to be different,” Rose said; “ save perhaps in the sense of its having become a little intensified. If I was here before as
Julia’s friend, I’m here still more as Julia’s friend now.”
Tony meditated, with all his candour; then he gave a highly cordial, even if a slightly illogical assent. “ Of course you are from your own point of view.” He evidently only wanted to meet her as far on the way to a quiet life as he could manage. “Dear little Julia!” he exclaimed in a manner which, as soon as he had spoken, he felt to be such a fresh piece of pointlessness that, to carry it off, he got up again.
“Dear little Julia!” Rose echoed, speaking out loud and clear, but with an expression which, unlike Tony’s, would have left on the mind of an ignorant auditor no doubt of its conveying a reference to the un forgotten dead.
Tony strolled towards the hammock. “ May I smoke a cigarette?” She approved with a gesture,that was almost impatient, and while he lighted he pursued with genial gaiety: “ I’m not going to allow you to pretend that you doubt of my having dreamed for years of the pleasure of seeing you here again, or of the diabolical ingenuity that I exercised to enable your visit to take place in the way most convenient to both of us. You used to say the queen-mother disliked you. You see today how much! ”
“She has ended by finding me useful,” said Rose. “That brings me exactly to what I told you just now I wanted to say to you.”
Tony had gathered the loose net of the hammock into a single strand, and, while he smoked, had lowered himself upon it, sideways, in a posture which made him sit as in a swing. He looked sur prised and even slightly disconcerted, like a man asked to pay twice. “ Oh, it isn’t then what you did say? ”
“About your use of my name? No, it isn’t that it’s something quite different.” Rose waited; she stood before him as she had stood before her previous interlocutor. “ It’s to let you know the interest I take in Paul Beever. I take the very greatest.”
“You do?” said Tony approvingly. “ Well, you might go in for something worse! ”
He spoke with a cheerfulness that covered all the ground; but she repeated the words as if challenging their sense. “ I might ‘ go in ’? ”
Her accent struck a light from them, put in an idea that had not been Tony’s own. Thus pre sented, the idea seemed happy, and, in his incon-trollable restlessness, his face more vividly bright ening, he rose to it with a zeal that brought him for a third time to his feet. He smiled ever so kindly and, before he could measure his words or his manner, broke out: “ If you only really would, you know, my dear Rose! ”
In a quicker flash he became aware that, as if he had dealt her a blow in the face, her eyes had filled with tears. It made the taste of his joke too bad. “Are you gracefully suggesting that I shall carry Mr. Beever off?” she demanded.
“Not from me, my dear never!” Tony blushed and felt how much there was to rectify in some of his impulses. “ I think a lot of him and I want to keep my hand on him. But I speak of him frankly, always, as a prize, and I want something awfully good to happen to him. If you like him,” he hastened laughingly to add, “of course it does happen I see! ”
He attenuated his meaning, but he had already exposed it, and he could perceive that Rose, with a kind of tragic perversity, was determined to get the full benefit, whatever it might be, of her impression or her grievance. She quickly did her best to look collected. “ You think he’s safe then, and solid, and not so stupid as he strikes one at first? ”
“Stupid? not a bit. He’s a statue in the block he’s a sort of slumbering giant. The right sort of tact will call him to life, the right sort of hand will work him out of the stone.”
“And it escaped you just now, in a moment of unusual expansion, that the right sort are mine? ”
Tony puffed away at his cigarette, smiling at her resolutely through its light smoke. “You do in justice to my attitude about you. There isn’t an hour of the day that I don’t indulge in some tribute or other to your great ability.”
Again there came into the girl’s face her strange alternative look the look of being made by her passion so acquainted with pain that even in the midst of it she could flower into charity. Sadly and gently she shook her head. “ Poor Tony! ”
Then she added in quite a different tone: “What do you think of the difference of our ages? ”
“Yours and Paul’s? It isn’t worth speaking of!”
“That’s sweet of you considering that he’s only twenty-two. However, I’m not yet thirty,” she went on; “and, of course, to gain time, one might press the thing hard.” She hesitated again; after which she continued: “ It’s awfully vulgar, this way, to put the dots on the i’s, but as it was you, and not I, who began it, I may ask if you really believe that if one should make a bit of an effort?” And she invitingly paused, to leave
him to complete a question as to which it was natural she should feel a delicacy.
Tony’s face, for an initiated observer, would have shown that he was by this time watching for a trap; but it would also have shown that, after a moment’s further reflection, he didn’t particularly care if the trap should catch him. “ If you take such an interest in Paul,” he replied with no visible abatement of his preference for the stand point of pleasantry, “you can calculate better than I the natural results of drawing him out. But what I can assure you is that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see you so happily ‘ estab lished,’ as they say so honourably married, so affec tionately surrounded and so thoroughly protected.”
“And all alongside of you here?” cried Rose.
Tony faltered, but he went on. “ It’s precisely your being ‘alongside’ of one that would enable one to see you.”
“It would enable one to see you it would have that particular merit,” said Rose. “ But my interest in Mr. Beever hasn’t at all been of a kind to prompt me to turn the possibility over for myself. You can readily imagine how far I should have been in that case from speaking of it to you. The defect of your charming picture,............