‘Claire!’ he murmured.
An exclamation at his elbow caused him to look up. There, leaning over a gate, the light of the moon falling on her beautiful face, stood Claire herself!
12
In trying interviews, as in sprint races, the start is everything. It was the fact that she recovered more quickly from her astonishment that enabled Claire to dominate her scene with Bill. She had the advantage of having a less complicated astonishment to recover from, for, though it was a shock to see him there when she had imagined that he was in New York, it was not nearly such a shock as it was to him to see her here when he had imagined that she was in England. She had adjusted her brain to the situation while he was still gaping.
‘Well, Bill?’
This speech in itself should have been enough to warn Lord Dawlish of impending doom. As far as love, affection, and tenderness are concerned, a girl might just as well hit a man with an axe as say ‘Well, Bill?’ to him when they have met unexpectedly in the moonlight after long separation. But Lord Dawlish was too shattered by surprise to be capable of observing -nuances-. If his love had ever waned or faltered, as conscience had suggested earlier in the day, it was at full blast now.
‘Claire!’ he cried.
He was moving to take her in his arms, but she drew back.
‘No, really, Bill!’ she said; and this time it did filter through into his disordered mind that all was not well. A man who is a good deal dazed at the moment may fail to appreciate a remark like ‘Well, Bill?’ but for a girl to draw back and say, ‘No, really, Bill!’ in a tone not exactly of loathing, but certainly of pained aversion, is a deliberately unfriendly act. The three short words, taken in conjunction with the movement, brought him up with as sharp a turn as if she had punched him in the eye.
‘Claire! What’s the matter?’
She looked at him steadily. She looked at him with a sort of queenly woodenness, as if he were behind a camera with a velvet bag over his head and had just told her to moisten the lips with the tip of the tongue. Her aspect staggered Lord Dawlish. A cursory inspection of his conscience showed nothing but purity and whiteness, but he must have done something, or she would not be staring at him like this.
‘I don’t understand!’ was the only remark that occurred to him.
‘Are you sure?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was at Reigelheimer’s Restaurant–Ah!’
The sudden start which Lord Dawlish had given at the opening words of her sentence justified the concluding word. Innocent as his behaviour had been that night at Reigelheimer’s, he had been glad at the time that he had not been observed. It now appeared that he had been observed, and it seemed to him that Long Island suddenly flung itself into a whirling dance. He heard Claire speaking a long way off: ‘I was there with Lady Wetherby. It was she who invited me to come to America. I went to the restaurant to see her dance–and I saw you!’
With a supreme effort Bill succeeded in calming down the excited landscape. He willed the trees to stop dancing, and they came reluctantly to a standstill. The world ceased to swim and flicker.
‘Let me explain,’ he said.
The moment he had said the words he wished he could recall them. Their substance was right enough; it was the sound of them that was wrong. They sounded like a line from a farce, where the erring husband has been caught by the masterful wife. They were ridiculous. Worse than being merely ridiculous, they created an atmosphere of guilt and evasion.
‘Explain! How can you explain? It is impossible to explain. I saw you with my own eyes making an exhibition of yourself with a horrible creature in salmon-pink. I’m not asking you who she is. I’m not questioning you about your relations with her at all. I don’t care who she was. The mere fact that you were at a public restaurant with a person of that kind is enough. No doubt you think I am making a great deal of fuss about a very ordinary thing. You consider that it is a man’s privilege to do these things, if he can do them without being found out. But it ended everything so far as I am concerned. Am I unreasonable? I don’t think so. You steal off to America, thinking I am in England, and behave like this. How could you do that if you really loved me? It’s the deceit of it that hurts me.’