FullReads

“Are you going out with the guns to-morrow?” asked Lady Eva languidly.

“Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no. I’m afraid I don’t shoot.”

The back of his neck began to glow. He had no illusions about himself. He was the biggest ass in Christendom.

“Perhaps you’d like to play a round of golf, then?”

“Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no.” There it was again, that awful phrase. He was certain he had not intended to utter it. She must be thinking him a perfect lunatic. “I don’t play golf.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment. It seemed to Roland that her gaze was partly contemptuous, partly pitying. He longed to tell her that, tho she had happened to pick on his weak points in the realm of sport, there were things he could do. An insane desire came upon him to babble about his school football team. Should he ask her to feel his quite respectable biceps? No.

“Never mind,” she said, kindly. “I daresay we shall think of something to amuse you.”

She held out her hand again. He took it in his for the briefest possible instant, painfully conscious the while that his own hand was clammy from the emotion through which he had been passing.

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Thank Heaven, she was gone. That let him out for another twelve hours at least.

A quarter of an hour later found Roland still sitting, where she had left him, his head in his hands. The groan of an overwrought soul escaped him.

“I can’t do it!”

He sprang to his feet.

“I won’t do it.”

A smooth voice from behind him spoke.

“I think you are quite right, sir–if I may make the remark.”

Roland had hardly ever been so startled in his life. In the first place, he was not aware of having uttered his thoughts aloud; in the second, he had imagined that he was alone in the room. And so, a moment before, he had been.

But the owner of the voice possessed, among other qualities, the cat-like faculty of entering a room perfectly noiselessly–a fact which had won for him, in the course of a long career in the service of the best families, the flattering position of star witness in a number of England’s raciest divorce-cases.

Mr. Teal, the butler–for it was no less a celebrity who had broken in on Roland’s reverie–was a long, thin man of a somewhat priestly cast of countenance. He lacked that air of reproving hauteur which many butlers possess, and it was for this reason that Roland had felt drawn to him during the black days of his stay at Evenwood Towers. Teal had been uncommonly nice to him on the whole. He had seemed to Roland, stricken by interviews with his host and Lady Kimbuck, the only human thing in the place.

He liked Teal. On the other hand, Teal was certainly taking a liberty. He could, if he so pleased, tell Teal to go to the deuce. Technically, he had the right to freeze Teal with a look.

He did neither of these things. He was feeling very lonely and very forlorn in a strange and depressing world, and Teal’s voice and manner were soothing.

“Hearing you speak, and seeing nobody else in the room,” went on the butler, “I thought for a moment that you were addressing me.”

This was not true, and Roland knew it was not true. Instinct told him that Teal knew that he knew it was not true; but he did not press the point.

“What do you mean–you think I am quite right?” he said. “You don’t know what I was thinking about.”

Teal smiled indulgently.

“On the contrary, sir. A child could have guessed it. You have just come to the decision–in my opinion a thoroughly sensible one–that your engagement to her ladyship can not be allowed to go on. You are quite right, sir. It won’t do.”

Personal magnetism covers a multitude of sins. Roland was perfectly well aware that he ought not to be standing here chatting over his and Lady Eva’s intimate affairs with a butler; but such was Teal’s magnetism that he was quite unable to do the right thing and tell him to mind his own business. “Teal, you forget yourself!” would have covered the situation. Roland, however, was physically incapable of saying “Teal, you forget yourself!” The bird knows all the time that he ought not to stand talking to the snake, but he is incapable of ending the conversation. Roland was conscious of a momentary wish that he was the sort of man who could tell butlers that they forgot themselves. But then that sort of man would never be in this sort of trouble. The “Teal, you forget yourself” type of man would be a first-class shot, a plus golfer, and would certainly consider himself extremely lucky to be engaged to Lady Eva.