“It’ll be all right!” Gerald persuasively continued.
He looked at her, as she was not looking at him. She was nineteen. But she seemed to him utterly mature and mysterious. Her face baffled him; her mind was a foreign land. Helpless in one sense she might be; yet she, and not he, stood for destiny; the future lay in the secret and capricious workings of that mind.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed curtly. “Oh no!”
“Oh no what?”
“We can’t possibly go like that,” she said.
“But don’t I tell you it’ll be all right?” he protested. “If we stay here and they come after you … ! Besides, I’ve got the tickets and all.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she demanded.
“But how could I?” he grumbled. “Have we had a single minute alone?”
This was nearly true. They could not have discussed the formalities of marriage in the crowded train, nor during the hurried lunch with a dozen cocked ears at the same table. He saw himself on sure ground here.
“Now, could we?” he pressed.
“And you talk about going to see pictures!” was her reply.
Undoubtedly this had been a grave error of tact. He recognized that it was a stupidity. And so he resented it, as though she had committed it and not he.
“My dear girl,” he said, hurt, “I acted for the best. It isn’t my fault if rules are altered and officials silly.”
“You ought to have told me before,” she persisted sullenly.
“But how could I?”
He almost believed in that moment that he had really intended to marry her, and that the ineptitudes of red-tape had prevented him from achieving his honourable purpose. Whereas he had done nothing whatever towards the marriage.
“Oh no! Oh no!” she repeated, with heavy lip and liquid eye. “Oh no!”
He gathered that she was flouting his suggestion of Paris.
Slowly and nervously he approached her. She did not stir nor look up. Her glance was fixed on the washstand. He bent down and murmured:
“Come, now. It’ll be all right. You’ll travel in the ladies’ saloon on the steam-packet.”
She did not stir. He bent lower and touched the back of her neck with his lips. And she sprang up, sobbing and angry. Because she was mad for him she hated him furiously. All tenderness had vanished.
“I’ll thank you not to touch me!” she said fiercely. She had given him her lips a moment ago, but now to graze her neck was an insult.
He smiled sheepishly. “But really you must be reasonable,” he argued. “What have I done?”
“It’s what you haven’t done, I think!” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me while we were in the cab?”
“I didn’t care to begin worrying you just then,” he replied: which was exactly true.
The fact was, he had of course shirked telling her that no marriage would occur that day. Not being a professional seducer of young girls, he lacked skill to do a difficult thing simply.
“Now come along, little girl,” he went on, with just a trifle of impatience. “Let’s go out and enjoy ourselves. I assure you that everything will be all right in Paris.”
“That’s what you said about coming to London,” she retorted sarcastically through her sobs. “And look at you!”
Did he imagine for a single instant that she would have come to London with him save on the understanding that she was to be married immediately upon arrival? This attitude of an indignant question was not to be reconciled with her belief that his excuses for himself were truthful. But she did not remark the discrepancy.
Her sarcasm wounded his vanity.
“Oh, very well!” he muttered. “If you don’t choose to believe what I say!” He shrugged his shoulders.
She said nothing; but the sobs swept at intervals through her frame, shaking it.
Reading hesitation in her face, he tried again. “Come along, little girl. And wipe your eyes.” And he approached her. She stepped back.
“No, no!” she denied him, passionately. He had esteemed her too cheaply. And she did not care to be called “little girl.”
“Then what shall you do?” he inquired, in a tone which blended mockery and bullying. She was making a fool of him.
“I can tell you what I shan’t do,” she said. “I shan’t go to Paris.” Her sobs were less frequent.
“That’s not my question,” he said icily. “I want to know what you will do.”
There was now no pretence of affectionateness either on her part or on his. They might, to judge from their attitudes, have been nourished from infancy on mutual hatred.
“What’s that got to do with you?” she demanded.
“It’s got everything to do with me,” he said.
“Well, you can go and find out!” she said.
It was girlish; it was childish; it was scarcely according to the canons for conducting a final rupture; but it was not the less tragically serious. Indeed, the spectacle of this young girl absurdly behaving like one, in a serious crisis, increased the tragicalness of the situation even if it did not heighten it. The idea that ran through Gerald’s brain was the ridiculous folly of having anything to do with young girls. He was quite blind to her beauty.
“ ‘Go’?” he repeated her word. “You mean that?”
“Of course I mean it,” she answered promptly.
The coward in him urged him to take advantage of her ignorant, helpless pride, and leave her at her word. He remembered the scene she had made at the pit shaft, and he said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper, and that he was a fool ever to have dreamed that it was, and that he would be doubly a fool now not to seize the opportunity of withdrawing from an insane enterprise.
“I am to go?” he asked, with a sneer.
She nodded.
“Of course if you order me to leave you, I must.
