CHAPTER VIII

PRAYERS AND PARABLES

I had quite forgotten one element which plays its part in most affairs of the affections.  I mean, of course, the element of pique.  Bob Evers, with the field to himself, had been sensible and safe enough; it was my intrusion, and nothing else, which had fanned his boyish flame into this premature conflagration.  Of that I felt convinced.  But Bob would not believe me if I told him so; and what else was there for me to tell him?  To betray Catherine and the secret of my presence, would simply hasten an irrevocable step.  To betray Mrs. Lascelles, and her secret, would certainly not prevent one.  Both courses were out of the question upon other grounds.  Yet what else was left?

To speak out boldly to Mrs. Lascelles, to betray Catherine and myself to her?

I shrank from that; nor had I any right to reveal a secret which was not only mine.  What then was I to do?  Here was this lad professedly on the point of proposing to this woman.  It was useless to speak to the lad; it was impossible to speak to the woman.  To be sure, she might not accept him; but the mere knowledge that she was to have the chance seemed enormously to increase my responsibility in the matter.  As for the dilemma in which I now found myself, deservedly as you please, there was no comparing it with any former phase of this affair.

  “O, what a tangled web we weave,
  When first we practise to deceive!”

The hackneyed lines sprang unbidden, as though to augment my punishment; then suddenly I reflected that it was not in my own interest I had begun to practise my deceit; and the thought of Catherine braced me up, perhaps partly because I felt that it should.  I put myself back into the fascinating little room in Elm Park Gardens.  I saw the slender figure in the picture hat, I heard the half-humorous and half-pathetic voice.  After all, it was for Catherine I had undertaken this ridiculous mission; she was therefore my first and had much better be my only consideration.  I could not run with the hare after hunting with the hounds.  And I should like to have seen Catherine’s face if I had expressed any sympathy with the hare!

No; it was better to be unscrupulously stanch to one woman than weakly chivalrous toward both; and my mind was made up by the end of dinner.  There was only one chance now of saving the wretched Bob, or rather one way of setting to work to save him; and that was by actually adopting the course with which he had already credited me.  He thought I was “trying to cut him out.”  Well, I would try!

But the more I thought of him, of Mrs. Lascelles, of them both, the less sanguine I felt of success; for had I been she (I could not help admitting it to myself), as lonely, as reckless, as unlucky, I would have married the dear young idiot on the spot.  Not that my own marriage (with Mrs. Lascelles) was an end that I contemplated for a moment as I took my cynical resolve.  And now I trust that I have made both my position and my intentions very plain, and have written myself down neither more of a fool nor less of a knave than circumstances (and one’s own infirmities) combined to make me at this juncture of my career.