“How dare you put your hand on me, you coward?” she exclaimed, with remarkable crispness of utterance and energy of style. “Who are you? I dont know you. Where are the police?” She paused for a reply; and a bracelet, broken by the blow she had given him, dropped on the pavement, and was officiously picked up and handed to her by a battered old woman who shewed in every wrinkle her burning sympathy with Woman turning at bay against Man. Susanna looked at the broken bracelet, and tears of vexation sprang to her eyes. “Look at what youve done!” she cried, holding out the bracelet in her left hand and shewing a scrape which had drawn blood on her right wrist. “For two pins I’d knock your head off!”
Marmaduke, quite out of countenance, and yet sullenly very angry, vacillated for a moment between his conflicting impulses to knock her down and to fly to the utmost ends of the earth. If he had been ten years older he would probably have knocked her down: as it was, he signed to the cabman, who gathered up the reins and held them clear of his fare’s damaged hat with the gratification of a man whose judgment in a delicate matter had just been signally confirmed by events.
As they started, Susanna made a dash at the cab, which was pulled up, amid a shout from the crowd, just in time to prevent an accident. Then, holding on to the rail and standing on the step, she addressed herself to the cabman, and, sacrificing all propriety of language to intensity of vituperation, demanded whether he wanted to run his cab over her body and kill her. He, with undisturbed foresight, answered not a word, but again shifted the reins so as to make way for her bonnet. Acknowledging the attention with one more epithet, she seated herself in the cab, from which Marmaduke at once indignantly rose to escape. But the hardiest Grasmere wrestler, stooping under the hood of a hansom, could not resist a vigorous pull at his coat tails; and Marmaduke was presently back in his seat again, with Susanna clinging to him and half sobbing:
“Oh, Bob, youve killed me. How could you?” Then, with a suspiciously sudden recovery of energy, she screamed “Bijou Theatre. Drive on, will you” up at the cabman, who was looking down through the trapdoor. The horse plunged forward, and, with the jolt, she was fawning on Marmaduke’s arm again, saying, “Dont be brutal to me any more, Bob. I cant bear it. I have enough trouble without your turning on me.”
He was young and green, and too much confused by this time to feel sure that he had not been the aggressor. But he did, on the whole, the wisest thing — folded his arms and sat silent, with his cheeks burning.
“Say something to me,” she said, shaking his arm. “I have nothing to say,” he replied. “I shall leave town for home tonight. I cant shew my face again after this.”
“Home,” she said, in her former contemptuous tone, flinging his arm away. “That means your cousin Constance.”
“Who told you about her?”
“Never mind. You are engaged to her.”
“You lie!”
Susanna was shaken. She looked hard at him, wondering whether he was deceiving her or not. “Look me in the face, Bob,” she said. If he had complied, she would not have believed him. But he treated the challenge with supreme disdain and stared straight ahead, obeying his male instinct, which taught him that the woman, with all the advantages on her side, would nevertheless let him win if he held on. At last she came caressingly to his shoulder again, and said:
“Why didnt you tell me about her yourself?”
“Damn it all,” he exclaimed, violently, “there is nothing to tell! I am not engaged to her: on my oath I am not. My people at home talk about a match between us as if it were a settled thing, though they know I dont care for her. But if you want to have the truth, I cant afford to say that I wont marry her, because I am too hard up to quarrel with the governor, who has set his heart on it. You see, the way I am circumstanced — —”
“Oh, bother your circumstances! Look here, Bob, I dont want you to introduce me to your swell relations; it is not worth my while to waste time on people who cant earn their own living. And never mind your governor: we can get on without him. If you are hard up for money, and he is stingy, you had better get it from me than from the Jews.”
“I couldnt do that,” said Marmaduke, touched. “In fact, I am well enough off. By the bye, I must not forget to pay you for that lunch. But if I ever am hard up, I will come to you. Will that do?”
“Of course: that is what I meant. Confound it, here we are already. You mustnt come in, you would only be in the way. Come tonight after the burlesque, if you like. Youre not angry with me, are you?”
Her breast touched his arm just then; and as if she had released some spring, all his love for her suddenly surged up within him and got the better of him. “Wait — listen,” he said, in a voice half choked with tenderness. “Look here, Lalage: the honest truth is that I shall be ruined if I marry you openly. Let us be married quietly, and keep it dark until I am more independent.”
“Married! Catch me at it — if you can. No, dear boy, I am very fond of you, and you are one of the right sort to make me the offer; but I wont let you put a collar round my neck. Matrimony is all very fine for women who have no better way of supporting themselves, but it wouldnt suit me. Dont look so dazed. What difference does it make to you?”
“But — —” He stopped, bewildered, gazing at her.
“Get out, you great goose!” she said, and suddenly sprang out of the hansom and darted into the theatre.
He sat gaping after her, horrified — genuinely horrified.
CHAPTER III
The Earl of Carbury was a youngish man with no sort of turn for being a nobleman. He could not bring himself to behave as if he was anybody in particular; and though this passed for perfect breeding whenever he by chance appeared in his place in society, on the magisterial bench, or in the House of Lords, it prevented him from making the most of the earldom, and was a standing grievance with his relatives, many of whom were the most impudent and uppish people on the face of the earth. He was, if he had only known it, a born republican, with no natural belief in earls at all; but as he was rather too modest to indulge his consciousness with broad generalizations of this kind, all he knew about the matter was that he was sensible of being a bad hand at his hereditary trade of territorial aristocrat. At a very early age he had disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her, which was considerable. His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics. An apprenticeship of six years at the bench would have made an educated workman of him: as it was, he pottered at every mechanical pursuit as a gentleman amateur in a laboratory and workshop which he had got built for himself in his park. In this magazine of toys — for such it virtually was at first — he satisfied his itchings to play with tools and machines. He was no sportsman; but if he saw in a shop window the most trumpery patent improvement in a breechloader, he would go in and buy it; and as to a new repeating rifle or liquefied gas gun, he would travel to St. Petersburg to see it. He wrote very little; but he had sixteen different typewriters, each guaranteed perfect by an American agent, who had also pledged himself that the other fifteen were miserable impostures. A really ingenious bicycle or tricycle always found in him a ready purchaser; and he had patented a roller skate and a railway brake. When the electric chair for dental operations was invented, he sacrificed a tooth to satisfy his curiosity as to its operation. He could not play brass instruments to any musical purpose;