FOR Guy was doing his great act of service. He said, as soon as she left them:
“Since she has asked me I shall go. I’ll see that he gets her message.”
“It’s no use, Guy,” protested Louise; “it’ll only put you in an odious situation. You can’t interfere in a thing like this, and I’m surprised you should want to, considering that you’ve said yourself it’s none of your business.”
“Who else can go?” asked Gordon. “I would if I could, but you know perfectly well …”
“Nobody can go. It’s not necessary. A doctor has been sent for from Killross.”
Ellen’s calm announcement had exasperated Louise. For three days she had been saying that Ellen must be made to see the truth, and nobody would agree with her. She did not want to admit that Dick would probably come back, if he knew the state of the case, and she did not want to admit that Barny was ill enough to make such an errand necessary. It was not a situation which fitted in well with the facts as she had arranged them.
“If she thinks she can whistle him back on this excuse …”
Gordon and Guy both protested. They were sure that Ellen had only been thinking of Barny.
“And we don’t even know where they are. What are you going to do? Are you going to the cottage?”
Guy did not know. He had thought vaguely that he might go to Killross and send a message by a third party to Dick. But Louise made small work of this idea.
“How do we know they are at the cottage? I don’t expect they are for a minute. They may have gone back to England. And you don’t want to spread the news of this business in Killross. Goodness knows there’s probably been enough gossip already. No. If you go you’d better go straight to the cottage and find out if they’re still there. And I wish you joy of it.”
This was a horrible suggestion to Guy, but he had to agree that it was the best course, and that much time would be lost if he sent a message from Killross. Nor had Louise quite finished with him.
“If he won’t come? What then?”
“We’ve no cause to think so badly of him as that,” broke in Gordon. “And Guy, you needn’t say she sent you. You can say I did. I take the whole responsibility.”
Guy looked from one to the other in helpless appeal. He could scarcely believe that he had ever volunteered to go upon so odious an expedition. But a hint of mockery in Louise’s eye stiffened his resolve and he said:
“Well, if I’m going I’d better go now.”
“There’s no time to be lost,” agreed Gordon.
As Guy passed out of the gate he thought he heard a laugh from Louise and a sharp word of expostulation from Gordon. He realised what a ridiculous figure he would cut in the tale which she might tell about it afterwards. Disgust nearly stifled him, and it seemed as if even Ellen was hardly worth all that he was enduring for her sake. But he forced himself to go on. He got out a boat and set off across the lake.
There remained Barny’s illness. That was real, and that was urgent; he found himself invoking it, now that Ellen’s image had begun to fail him. For try as he would, he could not at the moment recall her to her proper place, pacing serenely through the avenues of his thought. He tried to remember all the virtues which he had been accustomed to ascribe to her, and all the beautiful ideas which had been associated with her name. But it would not do. She would not mount her pedestal. She had certain attributes of which he could not approve. If she had remained passively tragic it would have been so much better. But by sending him on this errand, by involving him in this sordid business, she had displayed a certain toughness, an earthy commonsense, which shattered his dream. It was no doubt a practical thing to do, but he wished that she had not done it. She was insensitive, and that was an unpardonable flaw. The ideal woman, whom he had never met, must have at least as much sensibility as he had himself, together with all the tranquil temper which he himself, on account of his sensibility, could never possess. How any one woman was ever to combine those qualities he did not know, but until to-day he had really believed that such a combination might exist in Ellen.
But Barny was very ill. There was no doubt about that. And for his sake it would be wrong to hope that Dick and Elissa might have left the cottage.
It seemed probable that they had not, for he saw, even before he landed, that there was smoke coming out of their chimney. He pulled up his boat and picked his way over the puddles to the door.
But he had to knock twice before anyone came. At last he heard the sound of a chair being pushed back. Steps crossed the room and the door was opened by Dick, who very nearly shut it again when he saw who was there.
“What do you want?” he asked in a very surly voice.
Guy looked past him and said coldly:
“The Lindsays have sent me. Barny is very ill. His wife thinks it is acute appendicitis and there is said to be no doctor in the district. They are all in great distress, and it is suggested that you had better come back to the island at once.”
“Appendicitis!” exclaimed Dick, opening the door a little wider. “Barny? He would! Come in a minute …”
“No, thank you,” said Guy, who would rather have walked into a cage full of cobras.
Dick repressed a smile.
“I’m alone. There’s no one here.”
“I won’t come in, thank you.”
“Have it your own way. Why do they think it is appendicitis?”
Guy described the symptoms and Dick made an impatient sound of assent.
“Is there any rigidity?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t think it’s one of their scares?”
“Hardly. I don’t think they would have sent me if they hadn’t thought it urgent.”
“No. I don’t think they would.”
Again a grim smile flickered for a moment across Dick’s face.
“But how …” he began. “Does my … does my wife know you’ve been sent?”
“It was her suggestion, originally,” said Guy, with a little hesitation.
“Hmph. I see. I wish you’d come in. This wants considering. Did they tell you not to come in?”
Guy went in, reluctantly, and stood just inside the door. For one moment he had hoped that Elissa was gone for good, but he now saw her slippers sprawling on the floor, and the remains of a meal for two people still on the table. The whole room was squalidly untidy.
“This wants considering,” repeated Dick. “What’s to be done?”
“I can’t see that it does. He is really very ill. It’s urgent.”
“How do things stand over there? Gordon told everyone that he saw me here, I suppose?”
“Yes. But you are said to be walking, over in the mountains. That is what everyone has agreed to say.”
“Oh, I see. That puts a sort of face on it. Who invented that?”
“She did.”
“Ellen? Good God!”
Dick was greatly astonished by this, but he did not ponder on it for very long. He returned to Barny.
“I suppose I ought to go.”
Guy said nothing. His face suggested that Dick’s moral problems were beyond his power to decipher, and that the word “ought” upon such lips was an incongruity.
“I must go,” concluded Dick.
His belongings were scattered over the cottage, and he began to collect them and stuff them into his haversack. As he did so he talked, plying Guy with rapid questions and running over all the possibilities of getting hospital supplies in a hurry. For, as he pointed out, he could not in the worst event operate upon Barny with a carving knife.
“I’d better go straight back and have a look at him first. And if I do have to do anything in a hurry you must go down to Killross and telegraph. What is the nearest town? Or could we hire a motor in Killross, do you think? I suppose not. I’ve always told them that appendix of Barny’s might give them trouble. But he wouldn’t have it out. Do you see my boots anywhere?” Guy’s curt replies were meant to silence him, but he ignored their tacit reproof and went tramping up into the half-loft to find his boots It was as if he had succeeded in putting aside the whole question of his own misconduct, from the moment that he announced that he must go. He made Guy feel foolish, and it seemed possible that he might, when he got to Inishbar, make everybody feel foolish. He even had the effrontery to come and lean over the balustrade of the half-loft and say:
“Have you got a pencil? I shall have to leave a note to explain where I’ve gone.”
“I’ll wait outside,” said Guy hastily. “I’ll wait down by the boat till you’re ready.”
Not for anything would he remain a moment longer in the abode of evil. Already he had been contaminated past belief with this hunting for boots and borrowing of pencils. There was moral squalor, for him, in the very chairs and tables, the unwashed dishes and the tracks of mud on the floor. The place was no better than a pigsty, a fit shelter for beasts. He got himself out into the clean, sweet air of the evening and saw a cloaked figure coming along the road which looked very like Elissa. By dint of a somewhat undignified scuffle, he escaped into the birch trees before she got near enough to hail him.
A horrible suspicion had crossed his mind: the fear that Ellen might be going to take Dick back. If she did, he would never, never forgive her. She must forfeit, for all time, her claims to be the ideal woman. He might, with an effort of will, have just allowed her to sacrifice her pride enough to send for Dick simply to save her brother. But more than that he could never permit. The reality of Elissa’s cottage, with its dust and confusion, the slippers on the floor, had been too sordid. If Ellen could ever condone this swinish amour, then her memory also must become tarnished.
For twenty minutes Guy wrestled with the threat of disillusionment. He tried to tell himself that such a thing could never be. He tried to recapture that moment when they had walked in the burnished sunlight, by the lake, when she had given him the bog myrtle. For it had seemed to him then that she must be very near to heaven. The expression in her eyes had been heavenly. And she had asked him something, he could not remember, about the immortality of the soul. And he had come to the very edge of self-betrayal. He had thought that he loved her.
A shout from the lake-side roused him from his torment. Dick had come out of the cottage and was waiting by the boat.