She had never seen Robert anything but pale, but now it seemed to her that his face had chilled into a clay-like shade of grey. His long fingers moved nervously on the arm of his chair. He leaned to tease the fire into brightness, and drop another meagre log at the back. To escape her glance for a moment? Whatever it was he wanted to say, he was finding great difficulty in embarking upon it.
“Miss Cressett, please don’t think I am interfering in any way… I know you’ll realise that as Hugh’s elder brother I have a natural and permissible interest in his plans and prospects, but I certainly have no right to more than interest. Will you forgive me if I presume to ask you a question? You need not answer it if you don’t wish, of course, but I hope you’ll feel able to be indulgent towards the liberty I’m taking, simply because I am his brother. I gather that Hugh is—very fond of you. But… do you—has he asked you to marry him?”
Her hackles had gone up long before he reached the end of this curious speech, and the only thing that prevented her from diving headlong into prophetic anger on the spot was her acute awareness of the appalling effort this approach had cost him. She felt it in his too intense stillness rather than in any visible excitement. The lines of his mouth had drawn thin and taut, as if in pain, and he was looking at her with what she could only think of as desperation. Out-of-date patricians who find themselves faced with the task of warning off undesirable girls from hoping for marriage with the younger son of the blood, she thought, ought not to be so sensitive. But could it really be what it sounded like? Surely nobody still existed as behind the times as all that? Living, human fossils!
“We’ve never discussed ourselves or our affairs in those terms, exactly,” she said coolly.
“No, that I can believe, of course. But you must know his feelings, and… and your own.”
Dinah smiled; for a moment she even wanted to laugh. This sort of thing was absurdly easy, when it came to the point; it was he who was at a disadvantage.
“Is one necessarily always so sure of one’s own feelings?” she asked innocently.
He got up suddenly from his chair, and walked away from her to the nearer window. She saw him in profile, tall and thin and straight, quite in control of himself and yet curiously agitated. With his face still turned away from her he said:
“Miss Cressett, you’re young and able and modern, and—please let me say it!—very attractive. You have all your life before you. Don’t take any step without being absolutely certain of what you’re doing. At your age there’s no need to be in a hurry, and mistakes are more easily made than rectified. You know Hugh’s background. You know what his family is, what its history has been—all those centuries of us… The record’s there to be read, surely you must know how difficult it would be—how precarious…”
She stopped him there, stung out of her complacency. “Really, I think we’d better drop this. Don’t say any more, please.”
“No, I can’t stop now, I must try to make you realise… If only I knew how!” he said in a voice that was almost a groan. His hand was gripping the folds of the curtain so hard that a little flurry of dust-motes floated out slowly and uncurled upon the air; she saw them in the cross-light from the window.
“Don’t try too hard, because the one thing I’ve liked about you,” said Dinah, bristling, “is that you find this so hard to do.”
They were concentrating so furiously upon each other that neither of them heard the soft crunching of gravel under the wheels of a car rolling slowly up the drive.
“I suppose it was your mother who asked you to approach me—though as the head of the household, of course, you must feel pretty strongly yourself, too. What is it you find so unsuitable about me?”
He swung round on her with a face so transfigured by shock and consternation that it was like looking’at a new person, suddenly dauntingly alive and acutely vulnerable. But whatever he was about to say remained unsaid; for loud and suddenly the door-bell rang.
The sudden blaze of light in him went out on the instant. He stood for a moment breathing slowly and deeply, himself again, correct and calm.
“Please, excuse me, there’s no one else here to answer it.”
Dinah sat quivering a little with exasperation, rage and amusement, as he went to open the door. Dave’s voice, familiar and welcome, advanced into the hall. A girl’s voice after it, low-pitched and cool; he’d brought his Miss Trent with him to extricate his sister from the ogre’s castle. Not that Dinah felt herself to be any damsel in distress, but after the moment she had just experienced she had to admit that withdrawal was going to be a little more civilised in company. And after all, this was probably the last time she need ever enter this house. She rose from her chair as they all came into the room, and met them with a creditable smile, looking round for her bag and gloves as though the visit had drawn to a perfectly normal conclusion.
“I’m sorry if we’re too early,” said Dave, “but I knew you hadn’t got transport, and I thought we’d better fetch you. Alix won’t have too much time to spend with us, and I wanted you to meet her. I’m sure Mr. Macsen-Martel will understand.”
“Of course,” said Robert, a little stiffly, but not noticeably more so than usually. His manner could never be described as relaxed. “It was very good of Miss Cressett to give me her company at such short notice.” He looked at her, and his face was drawn and pale and fastidious as always, the long, straight strands of light-brown hair lying lank and dry on his high forehead. Somewhere behind the fixed, painted eyes the live creature lurked, either in ambush or in prison. Perhaps both at once.
So departure was easy. Robert fetched her coat, but it was Dave who took it from him and held it for her. Alix made a little light conversation about the house and its history. Alix might be a very dependable ally, Dinah thought, appraising her. Then they were all out on the doorstep, and Dave was opening the door of the car for the girls to get into the back seat together.
“Good-bye, Mr. Macsen-Martel!” No need to give him her hand; she was glad about that.
“Good-bye, Miss Cressett!”
They were back where they had started from, with the difference that he wouldn’t dare try that again. The door closed upon them, Dave got into the driving-seat; the car circled the island of flower-beds and moved away down the drive. Robert stood for a moment where they had left him, and then turned and went back into the house.
“You did come just a little too early, as a matter of fact,” she said, stretching in the back seat with a sigh of relief. “He never really got started on what he wanted to say, but by all the signs his job was to put me off marrying Hugh. Put me off or pay me off—he never got as far as offering me money, I really do wonder if he would have! Who do they think they are, with their ridiculous anemic faces and their feeble blue blood? In this day and age, I ask you! Hugh will be furious! At least, he would, only I haven’t the faintest intention of ever telling him.”
“He’s not the only one,” said Dave grimly from the driving seat, “who’s got a right to be furious.”
“But that’s nothing, you should hear how his mother says ‘in trade’—about you, love! She’s the one who gave Robert the job of getting rid of me, of course, to do him justice he wasn’t all that happy about it. She kept out of the way. Said to be ill in bed and under the doctor, but I suspect it’s a diplomatic illness.” Dinah was simmering down somewhat more slowly than she had expected of herself; was it possible that she could be really upset about such an absurd interview?