Isobel wasn’t sure whether she would be telling the truth if she said “No.” Car had certainly said “He’ll have to tell me so,” when she had declared that his uncle wanted to make it up. She blushed and said,
“Quarrels are such miserable things. Why shouldn’t you ask him to come back? It-it would be so lovely if we could all be friends again”
“H’m!” said Mr. Carthew. “Did he tell you to say that?”
“No-of course he didn’t. You know he’s proud-you said so yourself. If he’d been doing well and making money, he’d have asked you to be friends again long ago-but he’s been awfully, awfully poor. Don’t you see he simply couldn’t come back when it would look as if he were asking you to do something for him?”
Mr. Carthew planted his stick firmly behind him, put both hands on the crook, and leaned back against it.
“God bless my soul!” he said; and then, “You make him out a very fine, disinterested fellow, don’t you, my dear- eh? Most young fellows wouldn’t think so much about coming and asking an uncle to give them a helping hand. It’s his damned pride and obstinacy, I tell you, I wanted him to marry and settle down, and he wouldn’t-told me he’d no fancy for it. I’ve no patience with these young men of the present day-they’ve no sense of their obligations, no sense of responsibility. When a man’s got a property coming to him, it’s his duty to marry young. I married when I was twenty-three, and if I haven’t got a son of my own, it’s all the more reason why I should want to see Car’s children- isn’t it? Only, as I say, he set himself up against me, and the last thing he said to me-shall I tell you the last thing he said to me?”
“No, don’t,” said Isobel. “You ought to forget it. I expect you were both angry. Nobody means what they say when they’re angry-you know they don’t.”
Mr. Carthew stood bolt upright and brandished his stick in the air.
“He said, ‘I don’t care if I don’t ever see you again, and Linwood may go to-’ Well, I was brought up to consider a lady’s ears-so we’ll call it Jericho.”
Isobel looked at him with a sparkling challenge in her eyes. “And what had you just been saying to him?”
“God bless my soul, I forget.”
“Then don’t you think you’d better forget what he said too?”
“H’m!” said Mr. Carthew. He turned abruptly and began to walk away. “I shall be late for lunch,” he said, “Anna don’t like my being late for lunch.”
XXII
Mr. Bobby Markham opened the door of the hut on Linwood Edge. A complete and dense blackness confronted him.
The battery of his electric torch had given out, and at eleven o’clock on a moonless, starless night it had been dark enough coming here through the woods, but even to eyes grown accustomed to this darkness the inside of the hut presented an opaque and discouraging gloom.
Bobby Markham didn’t really like the dark very much. He found it afflicting to be asked to meet Anna at midnight in a lonely wood, and it may be said at once that for no other human being would he have come. He had hoped that she would have been here already. Comforting thoughts of finding the hut pleasantly lit up had sustained him. He opened the door, and the place was as black as the pit.
Yet when he had advanced a step, and was wishing, not for the first time, that he had a box of matches on him, he thought that he heard something move. He stood still instantly, quite still, listening. Something ever so slightly stirred in the black silence. A most unpleasant damp, pringling feeling spread rapidly from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers and toes. He grasped the defunct torch. But, in his inmost mind, the thing that he was afraid of was not a thing that could be bashed on the head or struck down by a damp, heavy fist. The very ancient menace of the terror that walks in darkness stirred, here, close at his side.
He stiffened, tried to draw breath, and felt the clammy air of the place stick in his throat. With paralyzing suddenness a round disk of brilliant light broke the dark, A beam sprang from it and just touched his face and his blinded, staring eyes. Then the torch dropped, and Anna’s voice said,
“You’re late.”
He got hold of the table and stood there shaking. How beastly-how beastly! His heart was thudding. He felt for the chair and sat down.
Anna switched off the torch.
“We can talk in the dark,” she said.
“Where’s the lantern?”-he managed to say that.
“It’s here. But we don’t want it-there’s always a chance of its attracting attention.”
He persisted.
“Light it. I can’t talk in the dark.”
He heard the spurt of a match and saw, with a most extraordinary relief, the yellow tongue of flame, the match, the outline of the lantern with the white guttered candle inside it. The flame caught the wick, and he could see the four walls of the hut, and Anna drawing back her hand and blowing out the match. She was bare-headed, with long shining diamond earrings that made rainbows of the light, and a black Chinese shawl wrapping her from shoulder to ankle. It was worked all over with small silken flowers bright as jewels. Her bare arm emerged from the long black fringe that edged it.
In the light, Bobby was himself again at once!-heavily good-natured and very much Anna Lang’s adoring slave.
“Come-that’s better!” he said.
“Is it?”
“Well, I like to look at you, you know. You look ripping in that shawl thing.”
With the movement that she made it slipped a little, showing the curve of her shoulder very white against the black.
“You mustn’t pay me compliments,” she said. “That’s not what I asked you to come here for.”
Car Fairfax would have been moved to inward mirth by the sad dignity of her tone. Bobby Markham admired it very much; it made him feel that he must be on his very best behavior. When Anna looked away for a moment, he got out a silk handkerchief and dried his forehead, which was unbecomingly damp and shiny. Like most fat men he was exceedingly vain. He put the handkerchief away quickly as Anna turned back again.
“I asked you to meet me because there’s something I want you to do for me,” she said.
“Anything little Bobby can do,” said Mr. Markham with an air of effusive sentiment which sat oddly on him. “As you know-”
She cut him short with a wave of the hand which he thought very graceful.
“Wait till you hear what it is.”
“I wouldn’t mind what it was as long as it pleased you.”
Anna rested her chin upon her hand.
“I wonder whether you really mean that.”
“Why, of course I do.” Then, with a touch of caution, “That is, if it’s anything I can do.”
“It is something that you can do if you will.”
He looked at her with a little sense of discomfort. There wasn’t any one like Anna, and he was devoted to her; but he did sometimes wish that she could be just what she was, beautiful, romantic, exciting, and yet at the same time a little more comfortable. He would have liked to be talking to her by a decent, civilized fireside for instance; and if there was anything she wanted him to do, he would like her to tell him straight out, and not sit looking at him in that dark, mysterious, hinting sort of way.
“Well, little Bobby’s willing,” he said.
Anna leaned forward and whispered in his ear, and immediately the smoldering discomfort which had made him think yearningly of drawing-rooms and restaurants burst into a flame of apprehension. He drew back, got out his handkerchief again, used it this time under Anna’s sustained gaze, and stammered,
“What for?”
“That’s my affair,” said Anna calmly.
“Not much it isn’t-not when you want me to get it for you. Look here, Anna-for heaven’s sake don’t tell me you’ve started taking the damned stuff!”