she came to him in the hall.
underneath her cordial ease of manner was the tiniest hint of shyness, a sort of half-forgotten breath of extreme youngness, i might almost say of childishness. yet, very assuredly, there was nothing gauche about the reception. the hint merely served to emphasize her youth. if john thought about her age at all, he probably placed her at about twenty-two or thereabouts, which, i take it, was pretty near the mark. but i don’t fancy the thought entered his mind. it was enough for him that there she was, sitting opposite to him in the dusky hall. a ray of sunlight, falling through an open window, caught the burnished copper of her hair, turning it to vivid flame. it looked a thing alive and palpitating, a burning aureole around her face.
and now that the eighth meeting was accomplished,[pg 208] john found himself suddenly tongue-tied, at a loss for any of those suitable little phrases fitting to the occasion. nothing is so infectious as embarrassment, however slight, more particularly if there be any degree of sympathy between the two. certainly it proved infectious in this case. words halted, phrases came disjointedly, disconnectedly.
john cursed himself inwardly for a fool, a procedure which, you may rightly guess, did not vastly aid matters. and then, suddenly, rosamund got up from her chair.
“won’t you come and see the garden,” she suggested.
it was an inspiration. john followed her with alacrity.
they came out on to a wide terrace. a stone balustrade ran its full length, a balustrade covered with climbing roses,—crimson, pink, white, yellow, and a pale purple-lavender. a queer rose this last, reminding one of the print gowns worn by one’s grandmothers. beyond the balustrade was a sunk lawn, and beyond that again the parkland, while further still was the shimmering blue of the distant sea.
[pg 209]
“how you must love it!”
the words escaped almost involuntarily from john’s lips. the next moment he would have recalled them. to remind her of the beauty of what she was about to lose, must surely be to emphasize the sense of that loss.
“love it!” she turned towards him with a little laugh. “it—it just belongs.”
john was silent. rosamund leaned upon the balustrade, half-sitting, half-standing.
“you needn’t mind saying what is in your thoughts,” said she. and there was a little whimsical smile in her eyes. “of course you can’t help thinking about the fact that we are going to lose it all, any more than i can help thinking about it. it makes freedom of speech just a trifle difficult, if all the time you are feeling it is a subject to be carefully avoided. granny and i speak of it quite naturally now.”
“i’d like to tell you how sorry i am,” said john.
“thank you,” she said simply.
there was a little pause. she gazed out towards the sea. to the right, a headland jutted out into its blueness. sea-gulls circled in the quiet air, [pg 210]tiny specks in the distance. boats, white and red sailed, made lazy way with the tide.
suddenly she turned impulsively towards him.
“i fancy,” said she, “that i’m going to tell you something.”
“do!” said he, his eyes upon her.
“you’ll laugh.”
“not a smile even.”
“hmm!” she debated. “an over-dose of seriousness might be even worse to face than laughter.”
“this is not fair,” protested john. “i can’t measure a smile to the hundredth part of an inch. i can, at least, promise not to mock at you. won’t that do?”
she laughed.
“yes; i believe it will. well, it’s this.” her voice dropped to seriousness. “i have a quite unreasoning feeling that we shan’t leave here after all. i can’t explain the feeling, and i am fully aware of the almost absurdity of it. i haven’t spoken of it to any one else. i can’t tell my grandmother, or father maloney. it might raise a faint hope which reason tells me will be doomed to disappointment. and yet—well, it seems almost that if one could only stretch out [pg 211]one’s hand a little way, through a kind of fog, one would find the key to the whole riddle. it must sound absurd to you, of course.”
john’s mind swung instantly to his own sensation of less than twenty minutes ago.
“no,” he said quietly. “it doesn’t sound at all absurd.”
she looked at him quickly.
“you speak almost as if you thought—” she broke off. after all it was an absurd imagination.
“i have thought the same,” said john smiling.
“you!” she was amazed.
“yes; as i came across the park just now.”
“oh!”
again there was a little silence.
“i wonder—” she said musingly. “do you think there’s the faintest possible chance?”
“there’s always the faintest possible chance,” john assured her. “oh, i’ll grant it’s the faintest possible, and heaven alone knows where it will spring from. but it’s there, i know it’s there. and we’ve both felt it.”
she nodded.
“i’m glad you’ve felt it too. it adds a little [pg 212]bit more hope, even while i’m almost laughing at myself. only—what is it we’ve both felt?”
“i don’t know,” said john. “i don’t know an atom. i think i get nearest the mark when i say that it seems as if, somewhere, there’s a dumb voice striving for expression. at least that is the only way i can describe the sensation to myself.”
“and all the time,” she added, “there’s a feeling of quietness in the atmosphere, the quietness that precedes something very important happening.”
“i know,” said john.
“ah, it’s tantalizing,” she sighed, “the inward knowledge of that, and yet the knowledge of one’s own impotence.”
her brow was wrinkled in a little frown, half of annoyance, half of something like regretful amusement. it was an adorable little frown, and john longed, ardently longed, to smooth it away. his heart beat and thumped, the while it cried warningly that the time was not yet. and from somewhere near at hand came the liquid note of a pigeon.
“go slow slowly, go slow slowly,” it seemed to remind him.
[pg 213]
“oh, yes, we’re impotent enough,” assented john, and a trifle gloomily.
“isn’t it all melodramatic?” she laughed.
“horribly,” agreed john.
“it’s an extraordinary conglomeration,” she pursued. “setting, old-world; drama, early victorian; period, twentieth century. do you suppose that any one who didn’t know about it, would believe it?”
“not an atom,” john assured her promptly. “if any one, i for instance, were to write a novel dealing with it, i’ll be bound i’d be considered to have strained the long arm of coincidence to breaking point. that’s the queer thing about truth. it’s always a thousand times, a million times, queerer than fiction.”
“it’s from precisely that—the very queerness of it,—that i can derive some small modicum of consolation,” she assured him gravely. “i feel, on occasions, that i am not myself at all, but merely a heroine in a book. only, if i were, i might be tolerably certain of a happy-ever-after ending. i might say indisputably certain, considering the style of the plot. here it is nothing but a toss-up.”
[pg 214]
“oh, no.” john shook his head. “i wouldn’t give mere chance quite such a free hand.”
“you mean that there’s a real plan behind it all?” she demanded point blank.
“oh, well!” said john. there was a slightly quizzical smile in his eyes.
“of course i know there is truly,” responded she, smiling in her turn. “but——”
“but me no buts,” retorted john. “chance isn’t a free agent, and you know it; though i’ll allow he has an extraordinary appearance of acting on his own account now and again. but that’s merely his guise. if he didn’t appear clad in that fashion, we’d misname him; and i’ve an idea he’s curiously tenacious of his personality. people, you know,” continued john slyly, “are apt to believe in his omnipotence.”
she laughed.
“i’ve believed in him myself before now,” owned john, having a sudden memory of a black and white goat. “only subsequent reflection invariably shows one that he isn’t acting on his own account, as he would have us believe.”
“i fancy you’re right,” said she reflectively. “if one really considers the seemingly haphazard[pg 215] happenings, one does see that there is always a connecting link backwards and forwards. nothing—no happening—is entirely isolated.”
“it is not,” said john. “only sometimes the connecting link is so fine as to be almost imperceptible.”
john had in mind a tiny faint link, so faint that it was only in the light of subsequent events that it had become visible. if, on a certain march afternoon, he had not yielded to a sudden inspiration to enter the brompton oratory, would he now have been standing in this garden? was not that the tiny, almost imperceptible link with all the events of the last ten days? oh, he had reason enough for his assured statement, he had proved it to the hilt.
he wanted, he badly wanted, to tell her, to speak of that tiny connecting link. but reason again assuring him that to do so would be to drag the moment too abruptly forward, he thrust the desire aside. and then, from the distance, came the sound of a silver gong.
rosamund got up from the balustrade.
“tea,” said she. “granny must have returned.”
