'Good heavens, Geoffrey! You don't mean—'
'I do! Wait a bit—that's not the worst of it. She has left the house.'
'Left the house?'
'Left, for good and all. She can't come back again.'
'Why not?'
'Because she's written to her missus. Women (hang 'em!) never do these things by halves. She's left a letter to say she's privately married, and gone off to her husband. Her husband is—Me. Not that I'm married to her yet, you understand. I have only promised to marry her. She has gone on first (on the sly) to a place four miles from this. And we settled I was to follow, and marry her privately this afternoon. That's out of the question now. While she's expecting me at the inn I shall be bowling along to London. Somebody must tell her what has happened—or she'll play the devil, and the whole business will burst up. I can't trust any of the people here. I'm done for, old chap, unless you help me.'
Arnold lifted his hands in dismay. 'It's the most dreadful situation, Geoffrey, I ever heard of in my life!'
Geoffrey thoroughly agreed with him. 'Enough to knock a man over,' he said, 'isn't it? I'd give something for a drink of beer.' He produced his everlasting pipe, from sheer force of habit. 'Got a match?' he asked.
Arnold's mind was too preoccupied to notice the question.
'I hope you won't think I'm making light of your father's illness,' he said, earnestly. 'But it seems to me—I must say it—it seems to me that the poor girl has the first claim on you.'
Geoffrey looked at him in surly amazement.
'The first claim on me? Do you think I'm going to risk being cut out of my father's will? Not for the best woman that ever put on a petticoat!'
Arnold's admiration of his friend was the solidly-founded admiration of many years; admiration for a man who could row, box, wrestle, jump—above all, who could swim—as few other men could perform those exercises in contemporary England. But that answer shook his faith. Only for the moment—unhappily for Arnold, only for the moment.
'You know best,' he returned, a little coldly. 'What can I do?'
Geoffrey took his arm—roughly as he took every thing; but in a companionable and confidential way.
'Go, like a good fellow, and tell her what has happened. We'll start from here as if we were both going to the railway; and I'll drop you at the foot-path, in the gig. You can get on to your own place afterward by the evening train. It puts you to no inconvenience, and it's doing the kind thing by an old friend. There's no risk of being found out. I'm to drive, remember! There's no servant with us, old boy, to notice, and tell tales.'
Even Arnold began to see dimly by this time that he was likely to pay his debt of obligation with interest—as Sir Patrick had foretold.
'What am I to say to her?' he asked. 'I'm bound to do all I can do to help you, and I will. But what am I to say?'
It was a natural question to put. It was not an easy question to answer. What a man, under given muscular circumstances, could do, no person living knew better than Geoffrey Delamayn. Of what a man, under given social circumstances, could say, no person living knew less.
'Say?' he repeated. 'Look here! say I'm half distracted, and all that. And—wait a bit—tell her to stop where she is till I write to her.'
Arnold hesitated. Absolutely ignorant of that low and limited form of knowledge which is called 'knowledge of the world,' his inbred delicacy of mind revealed to him the serious difficulty of the position which his friend was asking him to occupy as plainly as if he was looking at it through the warily-gathered experience of society of a man of twice his age.
'Can't you write to her now, Geoffrey?' he asked.
'What's the good of that?'
'Consider for a minute, and you will see. You have trusted me with a very awkward secret. I may be wrong—I never was mixed up in such a matter before—but to present myself to this lady as your messenger seems exposing her to a dreadful humiliation. Am I to go and tell her to her face: 'I know what you are hiding from the knowledge of all the world;' and is she to be expected to endure it?'
'Bosh!' said Geoffrey. 'They can endure a deal more than you think. I wish you had heard how she bullied me, in this very place. My good fellow, you don't understand women. The grand secret, in dealing with a woman, is to take her as you take a cat, by the scruff of the neck—'
'I can't face her—unless you will help me by breaking the thing to her first. I'll stick at no sacrifice to serve you; but—hang it!—make allowances, Geoffrey, for the difficulty you are putting me in. I am almost a stranger; I don't know how Miss Silvester may receive me, before I can open my lips.'
Those last words touched the question on its practical side. The matter-of-fact view of the difficulty was a view which Geoffrey instantly recognized and understood.
'She has the devil's own temper,' he said. 'There's no denying that. Perhaps I'd better write. Have we time to go into the house?'
'No. The house is full of people, and we haven't a minute to spare. Write at once, and write here. I have got a pencil.'
'What am I to write on?'
'Any thing—your brother's card.'
Geoffrey took the pencil which Arnold offered to him, and looked at the card. The lines his brother had written covered it. There was no room left. He felt in his pocket, and produced a letter—the letter which Anne had referred to at the interview between them—the letter which she had written to insist on his attending the lawn-party at Windygates.
