They seemed comparatively sober, so she tried entreaty. 'Please, let me pass,' she said pleasantly. 'I find I have taken the wrong road.'
'No, you haven't, dearie,' said one of the men, who from a superior neatness of apparel might have been a clerk. 'You've come the right road, for you've met us. And now you're not going away.' And he came forward with a protecting arm.
Alice, genuinely frightened, tried to cross the stream and escape by the other side. But the crossing was difficult, and she slipped at the outset and wet her ankles. One of the three lurched into the water after her, and withdrew with sundry oaths.
The poor girl was in sad perplexity. Before was an ugly rush of water and a leap beyond her strength; behind, three drunken men, their mouths full of endearment and scurrility. She looked despairingly to the level white road for the Perseus who should deliver her.
And to her joy the deliverer was not wanting. In the thick of the idiot shouting of the trio there came the clink-clank of a horse's feet and a young man came over the bridge. He saw the picture at a glance and its meaning; and it took him short time to be on his feet and then over the broken stone wall to the waterside. Suddenly to the girl's delight there appeared at the back of the roughs the inquiring, sunburnt face of Lewis.
The men turned and stared with hanging jaws. 'Now, what the dickens is this?' he cried, and catching two of their necks he pulled their heads together and then flung them apart.
The three seemed sobered by the apparition. 'And what the h-ll is your business?' they cried conjointly; and one, a dark-browed fellow, doubled his fists and advanced.
Lewis stood regarding them with a smiling face and very bright, cross eyes. 'Are you by way of insulting this lady? If you weren't drunk, I'd teach you manners. Get out of this in case I forget myself.'
For answer the foremost of the men hit out. A glance convinced Lewis that there was enough sobriety to make a fight of it. 'Miss Wishart. . Alice,' he cried, 'come back and go down to the road and see to my horse, please. I'll be down in a second.'
The girl obeyed, and so it fell out that there was no witness to that burn-side encounter. It was a complex fight and it lasted for more than a second. Two of the men had the grace to feel ashamed of themselves half-way through, and retired from the contest with shaky limbs and aching faces. The third had to be assisted to his feet in the end by his antagonist. It was not a good fight, for the three were pasty-faced, overgrown young men, in no training and stupid with liquor.
But they pressed hard on Lewis for a little, till he was compelled in self-defence to treat them as fair opponents.
He came down the road in a quarter of an hour with a huge rent in his coat-sleeve and a small cut on his forehead. He was warm and breathless, still righteously indignant at the event, and half-ashamed of so degrading an encounter. He found the girl standing statue-like, holding the bridle-rein, and looking into the distance with vacant eyes.
'Are you going back to Glenavelin, Miss Wishart?' he asked. 'I think I had better go with you if you will allow me.'
Alice mutely assented and walked beside him while he led his horse. He could think of nothing to say. The whole world lay between them now, and there was no single word which either could speak without showing some trace of the tragic separation.
It was the girl who first broke the silence.
'I want to thank you with all my heart,' she stammered. And then by an awkward intuition she looked in his face and saw written there all the hopelessness and longing which he was striving to conceal. For one moment she saw clearly, and then the crooked perplexities of the world seemed to stare cruelly in her eyes. A sob caught her voice, and before she was conscious of her action she laid a hand on Lewis's arm and burst into tears.
The sight was so unexpected that it deprived him of all power of action.
Then came the fatally easy solution that it was but reaction of over-strained nerves. Always ill at ease in a woman's presence, a woman's tears reduced him to despair. He stroked her hair gently as he would have quieted a favourite horse.
'I am so sorry that these brutes have frightened you. But here we are at Glenavelin gates.'
And all the while his heart was crying out to him to clasp her in his arms, and the words which trembled on his tongue were the passionate consolations of a lover.
Chapter XVI
A MOVEMENT OP THE POWERS
At Mrs. Montrayner's dinner parties a world of silent men is sandwiched between a _monde_ of chattering women. The hostess has a taste for busy celebrities who eat their dinner without thought of the cookery, and regard their fair neighbours much as the diners think of the band in a restaurant. She chose her company with care, and if at her table there was not the busy clack of a fluent conversation, there was always the possibility of _bons mots_ and the off-chance of a State secret. So to have dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small social set, and to the unilluminate the Montrayner banquets seemed scarce less momentous than Cabinet meetings.
Wratislaw found himself staring dully at a snowy bank of flowers and looking listlessly at the faces beyond. He was extremely worried, and his grey face and sunken eyes showed the labour he had been passing through. The country was approaching the throes of a crisis, and as yet the future was a blind alley to him. There was an autumn session, and he had been badgered all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temper had been perilously near its limits, and he had been betrayed unconsciously into certain ineptitudes which he knew would grin in his face on the morrow from a dozen leading articles. The Continent seemed on the edge of an outbreak; in the East especially, Russia by a score of petty acts had seemed to foreshadow an incomprehensible policy. It was a powder-barrel waiting for the spark; and he felt dismally that the spark might come at any moment from some unlooked-for quarter of the globe. He ran over in his mind the position of foreign affairs. All seemed vaguely safe; and yet he was conscious that all was vaguely unsettled. The world was on the eve of one of its cyclic changes, and unrest seemed to make the air murky.
He tried to be polite and listened attentively to the lady on his right, who was telling him the latest gossip about a certain famous marriage.
But his air was so manifestly artificial that she turned to the presumably more attractive topic of his doings.
'You look ill,' she said-she was one who adopted the motherly air towards young men, which only a pretty woman can use. 'Are they over-working you in the House?'
'Pretty fair,' and he smiled grimly. 'But really I can't complain. I have had eight hours' sleep in the last four days, and I don't think Beauregard could say as much. Some day I shall break loose and go to a quiet place and sleep for a week. Brittany would do-or Scotland.'
'I was in Scotland last week,' she said. 'I didn't find it quiet. It was at one of those theatrical Highland houses where they pipe you to sleep and pipe you to breakfast. I used to have to sit up all night by the fire and read Marius the Epicurean, to compose myself. Did you ever try the specific?'
'No,' he said, laughing. 'I always soothe my nerves with Blue-books.'
She made a mouth at the thought. 'And do you know I met such a nice man up there, who said you were a great friend of his? His name was Haystoun.'
'Do you remember his Christian name?' he asked.
'Lewis,' she said without hesitation.
He laughed. 'He is a man who should only have one name and that his Christian one. I never heard him called 'Haystoun' in my life. How is he?'
'He seemed well, but he struck me as being at rather a loose end. What is wrong with him? You know him well and can tell me. He seems to have nothing to do; to have fallen out of his niche, you know. And he looks so extraordinarily clever.'
'He _is_ extraordinarily clever. But if I undertook to tell you what was wrong with Lewie Haystoun, I should never get to the House to-night.
