Two expressions overlapped each other, quick as thought, across Mrs. Hastings’s tremulous face. The first one was sheer pain. The second was irrepressible childish amusement.
“Dear Lexie!” she murmured; and then in a calmer voice, “I expect I do seem to you silly. But it isn’t as simple as you think it is. If you only knew, you wouldn’t look at me as you’re looking now. I’m not putting this on. I’m not playing on your sympathy. There may be quite natural reasons for these things; but I tell you William’s a different person from what any of you dream. He’s not an ordinary person at all. He’s — he’s — he’s either mad or he’s thinking — thinking something — that destroys — you know? — that destroys everything!”
Lexie withdrew even from behind the narrow aperture of his defensive tower. He withdrew backward, backward, till nothing was visible of him but a suspicious pair of fox’s eyes blinking out of the darkness.
The girl sighed, but something seemed to drive her on to betray herself. “Don’t you believe in good Powers and evil Powers? You must! You must! Don’t you believe in people being obsessed?”
He made a movement with his hand as if to interrupt her.
“I could make you believe!” she cried, raising her voice. “I could make you!”
He came back again to the arrow-slit in his tower.
“Poppycock!” he murmured; and it was almost as if he had been a brutal schoolboy putting out his tongue.
She winced and fell back in her chair. A kind of bewildered anger seized her heart against all these men. She visualized the corrugated leathery countenance in front of her, smiling that superior smile, as if it were a burrowing badger, digging itself obstinately into its familiar hole when the sky was full of flaring comets.
“You don’t believe in anything, then,” she remarked faintly, “that doesn’t happen under your very nose?”
“I don’t believe in all these mystical fol-de-rols,” cried Lexie; “and it would be a damned good thing for you if I could shake them out of your head.”
The mere sight of her twisted mouth, quivering there before him as if he had struck it with the back of his hand, seemed to aggravate him to further abuse.
“The worst of you women,” he began again, “is that you always find some mysterious fantastic reason for a perfectly legitimate and natural thing. You are thoroughly sick of that good man of yours; sick to death of him; and I don’t blame you. Why don’t you honestly say so, then, instead of dragging in all these metaphysical cantraps, and trying to make out that the poor devil’s a bloody magician or God knows what?”
She turned away from him with a hopeless sigh and stared into the fire, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her long thin arm supporting her chin.
The reaction from his scolding tone, from his “beating her up” as he called it, caused a delicious warmth toward her to pass through his veins. Watching her sitting there, so much at his mercy, he experienced a sudden twinge of jealousy over his brother’s prerogative. In the present sweetness of his feeling toward her, now that he had chastised her for her silliness, he felt greatly tempted to give his brother’s monopoly a timely jolt.
His eyes narrowed under their heavy Cæsarean lids. She was a highly strung little wench. She would probably let him embrace her out of pure craving for sympathy, for refuge, for protection. The image of Rook’s figure, as it had leant by his side at the moonlit window, the outline of that profile, high-cheekboned like a Red Indian, the shape of that closely cropped dark-haired skull, rose up irrelevantly, accusingly. And life was so short — so atrociously short — especially—his life!
He rose and came over to Nell’s side. He laid his hand on the back of the girl’s chair and caressed its polished woodwork with little jerky movements of his fingers. “Shall I touch her hair?” be thought, “or put my hand on her shoulder?”
He stood there very awkwardly for a perceptible passage of time while the girl beside him made herself more comfortable by a little indrawing movement. She seemed to be absorbed in a not unpleasant but very complicated piece of thinking.
“To the devil with these haverings!” he said to himself. “But why does a person’s heart beat so absurdly at the mere thought of doing such a natural, such an inevitable thing? And why this sickening sensation in the pit of one’s stomach?”
“You’re not angry with me, Nell dear?” he asked. His voice must have had a quaver, a huskiness, a strained note in it, as quickly recognized by feminine nerves as the flick of a pike’s tail is recognized by suspicious minnows. She gave him a scared sidelong look. But even in the act of turning her head toward him and meeting his gaze the fear went out of her face. There is always something pathetic and childish to a woman in a man’s physical desire. To the man’s own consciousness he may appear a veritable devil. To his would-be victim he is much more like a greedy infant.
Nell Hastings was not conscious at that moment of the least quiver of moral indignation. She just lifted her chin from her hand, pulled up her feet under her in the big chair and looked straight back at him with an understanding smile; a smile of more direct girlish happiness than had crossed her face for many a long month!
In the simple glow of finding herself desired by a man she respected, the nameless horror she had run away from receded and receded. What made Lexie’s embarrassed overture the more touching was the very fact of his illness. He stirred something within her that had never been stirred before, her inborn protective instinct. She felt toward him what a lover of woods might feel who comes upon a rugged sturdy tree marked with a great staring notch and a chalk number. The last thing she had expected was that Lexie, as well as his mysterious brother, should look at her like that. Of course, it was different from what Rook made her feel. That was a thing by itself. She had not decided yet what that was. But she was far too grateful to poor dear Lexie for wanting her at all, and he so stricken and threatened, to fuss herself much as to how this situation dovetailed in with the other.
“Poor little Nell! Poor little Nell!” He had taken both her wrists now in one of his hands and had put the other lightly on her shoulder.
What she meant to do was to laugh affectionately and snatch her hands away, but instead of doing that she found herself standing by his side. Had he pulled her out of the chair or had she, to release herself from him, slipped out of it herself?
“Don’t do that! No! No! Don’t do that!” Her voice sounded calm and sensible enough, but what was the use of a calm voice when she was already in his arms and yielding to his agitated caresses?
Her mind raced about in all sorts of funny directions while she submitted to his love-making. She caught sight, over his shoulder, of a row of books entitled “Mermaid Classics” and she wondered what the girls in those books did when people took them in their arms. She found herself listening to see if she could hear Mrs. Bellamy moving about in the house. Then, in the midst of her feeble movements of resistance, she caught sight of a little bust of Voltaire on the mantelpiece. How benignly that malicious old man was watching her!
Suddenly she drew away from him and shook off his hands.
“Please don’t, Lexie! I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want it.”
His face looked haggard as she pushed him back and she felt a wave of dangerous pity for him. How could he know that she had brought it to an end not because of indifference but because of the opposite of indifference? It was all right as long as she was a passive rag doll in his hands; but if she began to come to life — it wouldn’t do.
In a moment she became stiff as a block of wood; and though she still smiled at him and displayed no shadow of anger against him, he felt that, for that day at least, he must be just the friend again, just the kind, disinterested friend.