"We had a grand talk last night—Sir Charles was in splendid form. I enjoyed it down to the ground."
Tom Verity lay, at full length on the upward sloping, sun-warmed bank of sand and shingle. Only to youth is given enjoyment of perfect laziness joined with perfect physical vigour. Just because he felt equal to vaulting the moon or long-jumping an entire continent, should such prodigious feats be required of him, could he lie thus in glorious idleness letting the earth cradle and the sun soak into him. Doubts and disturbances of last night melted in daylight to an almost ludicrous nothingness and self-confidence reigned; so that he declared the world a super-excellent place, snapping his fingers at problems and mysteries. A spark of curiosity pricked him still, it is true, concerning the origin of certain undeniably queer aural phenomena. He meant to satisfy that curiosity presently; but the subject must be approached with tact. He must wait on opportunity.
A few paces from and above him, Damaris sat on the crown of the ridge, where the light southerly wind, coming up now and again off the sea, fanned her. A white knitted jersey, pulled on over her linen dress, moulded the curve of her back, the round of her breasts and turn of her waist, showing each movement of her gracious young body to the hips, as she leaned forward, her knees drawn up and her feet planted among the red, orange, and cream-grey flints and pebbles.
Looking up at her, Tom saw her face foreshortened in the shade of her broad brimmed garden hat, a soft clear flush on it born of health, fresh air and sunlight, her eyes shining, the blue of the open sea in their luminous depths. He received a new impression of her. She belonged to the morning, formed part of the gladness of universal Nature, an unfettered nymph-like being. To-day her mood was sprightly, bidding farewell to ceremony. Yet, he felt, she remained perplexing, because more detached than is the feminine habit, poised and complete in herself.
And this detachment, this suppression of the sentimental or social note—he being admittedly a very personable fellow—piqued Tom's male vanity, so that he rallied her with:
"But by the way, why did you vanish so early, why didn't you stay with us after dinner last night?"
"I did not want to vanish," she answered. "Nothing is more delightful than hearing my father talk. But had I stayed Miss Bilson would have supposed herself free to stay too, and that would have spoiled the evening. My father doesn't choose to talk freely before Miss Bilson, because she gets into a foolish excited state and interrupts and asks questions. She overflows with admiration and that annoys and bores him."
"'She brought him butter in a lordly dish,'" Tom quoted. "The ill-advisedBilson. Can't one just see her!"
"And it is not her place to admire out loud," Damaris continued. "Over and over again I have tried to explain that to her. But in some ways, she is not at all clever. She can't or won't understand, and only tells Aunt Felicia I am wanting in sympathy and that I hurt her feelings. She has unreasonably many feelings, I think, and they are so easily hurt. I always know when the hurting takes place because she sniffs and then plays Mendelssohn's Songs without Words on the schoolroom piano."
Tom chuckled. She had a caustic tongue on occasion, this nymph-like creature!
"Alas, poor Bilson!" he said. "For, as Sir Charles walked across the garden with us down to the ferry, didn't I hear those same sugary melodies tinkling out of some upper open window?"
"I am afraid you did. You see she had made up her mind to come with me."
"And you were forced to intimate you found yourself quite equal to conducting the expedition unshepherded?"
"I did not mean to be unkind, but she would have been so dreadfully in the way"—
Damaris gathered up a handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she gazed away out to sea.
"This is a day by itself," she said. "It looks like jewels, topazes, turquoise, and pearls; and it seems full of things which half tell themselves, and then hide from or pass you by.—I wanted to watch it all and think; and, she doesn't do it on purpose I know, but somehow Miss Bilson always interferes with my thinking."
Both the tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental; and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was unwelcome. To breathe it demanded exertion. So he said, chaffingly:
"Do I interfere with your thinking? I hope not. But if I offend that way, speak but a word and I disappear like a shot."
"Oh! no," she answered. "How could you interfere? You are part of it. You started it, you see, because you are going to India."
Whereat, failing to catch the sequence of ideas, male vanity plumed itself, tickled to the point of amusement. For was not she a child after all, transparently simple and candid, and very much a woman-child at that! Tom turning on his side raised himself on one elbow, smiling at her with easy good-nature.
"How charming of you to adopt me as a special object of thought, and care so much about my going."
But patronage proved short-lived. The girl's colour deepened, but her eyes dwelt on him coldly.
"I have only been thinking how fortunate you are, and seeing pictures in my mind of what you will see which will be new to you—and—and remembering."
"Oh! of course, I am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man—if he has any receptive faculty that is—and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune.—But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, when you left India."
"No, I was six years old, and I remember quite well. All my caring for people, all my thinking, begins there, in the palace of the Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur and the great compound, when my father was Chief Commissioner."
Her snub duly delivered, and she secure it had gone home, Damaris unbent, graciously communicative as never before.
"It was all so beautiful and safe there inside the high walls, and yet a teeny bit frightening because you knew there were other things—as there are to-day—which you felt but couldn't quite see all about you. Sometimes they nearly pushed through—I was always expecting and I like to expect. It hurt me dreadfully to go away; but I had been very ill. They were afraid I should die and so Dr. McCabe—he was here when you arrived yesterday—insisted on my being sent to Europe. A lady—Mrs. Pereira—and my nurse Sarah Watson took me to Paris, to the convent school where I was to be educated. It was all very strange, but the nuns were kind. I liked their religion, and I got accustomed to the other little girls. I had rooms of my own; and French friends of my father's visited me and took me out on half-holidays. And Aunt Felicia came over to fetch me for the summer vacations and brought me here"—
Damaris pointed across the tide-way to the river frontage, including with one sweeping gesture the whole demesne of The Hard from the deep lane on the one hand, opening funnel-like upon the shore, past sea-wall—topped at the corner by pink plumed tamarisk, the small twin cannons and pyramid of ball—the lawn and irregular white house overlooking it, backed and flanked by rich growth of trees, to a strip of sandy warren and pine scrub on the other, from out which a line of some half-dozen purple stemmed, red branched Scotch firs, along with the grey stone built Inn and tarred wooden cottages on the promontory beyond, showed through a dancing shimmer of heat haze, against the land-locked, blue and silver waters of Marychurch Haven.
"I did not like being here at all at first," she told him. "I thought it a mean place only fit for quite poor people to live in. The house seemed so pinched and naked without any galleries or verandahs. And I was afraid because we had so few servants and neither door-keepers or soldiers. I could not believe that in England there is so little need for protection against disaffected persons and thieves. The sunshine was pale and thin, and the dusk made me sad. At Bhutpur the sun used to drop in flame behind the edge of the world and night leap on you. But here the day took so long dying. Aunt Felicia used to praise what she called 'the long sweet English twilight,' and try to make me stop out in the garden to enjoy it with her. But I could not bear it. The colours faded so slowly. It seemed like watching some helpless creature bleed to death silently, growing greyer minute by minute and feebler. I did not want to watch, but go indoors where the lamps were lighted and it was warm and cosy. I used to cry dreadfully, when I could get away by myself where Aunt Felicia and the maids could not see me, cry for my father—he resigned the Commissionership, you know, when I was sent home and took service in Afghanistan under the Ameer—and for my darling friend, Mrs. Pereira, and for the Sultan-i-bagh, where I knew strangers lived now. For the lotus tank and orange grove, and all my little tame animals and my pretty play-places I should never, never see any more"—
Overcome by which intimate memories, Damaris' grave voice—which had taken on a chanting cadence, at once novel and singularly pleasing to the young man's ear—quavered and broke.
"Poor little exiled princess!" he cried, all his facile kindness to the fore again. "Yes, it must have been cruelly hard on you. You must have suffered. No wonder you cried—cried buckets full."
And drawn by pity for that desolate, tropic-bred little child, Tom got on to his feet and crunched up the loose shingle to the crest of the ridge, full of a lively desire to pacify and console. But here the soft breeze met and caressed him, and the whole plain of the tranquil sea came into view—turquoise shot with pearl, as Damaris recently figured it, and fringed with topaz where waves, a few inches high and clear as glass, broke on the yellow sand at the back of the Bar just below.
"How wonderfully lovely!" he exclaimed, carried out of himself by the extreme fairness of the scene. And, his hands in his trouser pockets he stood staring, while once again the pull of home, of England, of tenderness for all that which he was about to leave, dimmed his eyes and raised a lump in his throat.
"Upon my word, you must be difficult to please if this place doesn't please you or come up to your requirements, Damaris," he said, presently sitting down beside her. "No Arabian Nights palace in Asia, I grant you; yet in its own humbler and—dare I say?—less showy, manner not easy to beat. Breathe this enchanting air. See the heavenly tints with which our good dirty useful old Channel has adorned itself. Can you ask for more, you insatiable person, in the way of beauty?"
Then, slightly ashamed of his outburst, Tom practised a delightful smile, at once sentimental and flirtatious.
"No, on second thoughts, my dear princess, I keep my commiseration for my wretched self—every crumb of it. For I am the lonely exile—that is, I am just about to be—not you. Be advised, don't quarrel with the good gifts of the gods. Deadham Hard is frankly entrancing. How willingly would I put off taking ship for your vaunted India, and spend the unending cycles of eternity here—with you, well understood—in this most delectable spot instead."
Whereupon Damaris, with mingled gravity and haste, her head bent, so that hat-crown and hat-brim were presented to the young man's observation rather than her face, proceeded to explain she had spoken not of the present but of the past. From the time Sir Charles returned to inhabit it, The Hard was transformed; his presence conferring interest and dignity upon it, rendering it a not unworthy dwelling-place indeed—should any such happen that way—for sages, conquerors, or even kings. He cared for the little property, a fact to her all sufficient. For him it held the charm of old associations. The pleasantest days of his boyhood were spent here with Thomas Clarkson Verity, his great uncle—who eventually left him the property—nor had he ever failed later to visit it when home on leave. In pious remembrance of that distant era and of his entertaining and affectionate, if somewhat eccentric, host and friend he forbade any alteration in the house or grounds. It continued to-day just as old Mr. Verity left it. There was no break, even in details of furnishing or arrangement, with the past. This, to Sir Charles, added to the natural restfulness of the place. Now after the great achievements and responsibilities of his Eastern career he found retirement congenial. The soft equable climate benefited his health. Rough shooting and good fishing could be had in plenty—stag-hunting, too, in Arnewood Forest, when he inclined to such sport. The Hard was sufficiently easy of access from town for friends to come and stay with him. Convenient for crossing to the Continent too, when he took his yearly cure at Aix or at Vichy, or went south for a couple of months, as last winter for instance, to Cette, Montpelier and across, by Pau, to the Atlantic seaboard at St. Sebastian, Biarritz, and Bayonne.
"When my father travels I go with him," Damaris said, raising her head and looking at the young man with proud, deliberate eyes. "We both suffered too much, we must never be separated again. And when we go abroad, we go alone. There is no one to give advice or interfere. We take Hordle, to pack and look after the baggage. We are always together, and I am always happy. I wish we could live like that always, with no settled home. But after a while, my father grows tired of hotels. He begins to wish for the quiet of The Hard, and all the things he is accustomed to. And then, naturally, I begin to wish for it too."
From which statement, made as he judged with intention, Tom apprehended an attachment of no common order existing between these two persons, father and child. If, as family gossip disapprovingly hinted, the affection given appeared to trench on exaggeration, the affection returned was of kindred quality, fervid, self-realized, absorbing, and absorbed. Comparing it with his own humorously tolerant filial attitude, Tom felt at once contrite and injured. The contrast was glaring. But then, as he hastened to add—though whether in extenuation of his own, or of his father's, shortcomings remained open to question—wasn't the contrast between the slightly pompous, slightly bow-windowed, provincial, Tory cleric and this spare, inscrutable soldier and ruler, glaring likewise? To demand that the one should either experience or inspire the same emotions as the other was palpably absurd! Hence (comfortable conclusion!) neither he, Tom, nor the Archdeacon was really to blame.—Only, as he further argued, once the absurdity of that same demand admitted, were you not free to talk of exaggeration, or of the "grand manner," as you chose? Were not the terms interchangeable, if you kept an open mind? His personal acquaintance with the "grand manner" in respect of the affections, with heroical love, amounted, save in literature, to practically nothing; yet instinctively he applied those high sounding phrases to the attachment existing between Damaris and her father. Both as discovery and, in some sort, as challenge to his own preconceived ideas and methods this gave him food for serious thought.
He made no attempt at comment or answer; but sat silent beside the girl, bare-headed in the soft wind and sunlight, between the flowing river and tranquil sea.
The "grand manner"—that was how, naturally, without posing or bombast, these two persons envisaged life for good or evil—for this last, too, might be possible!—shaped their purposes and conduct. Sir Charles, he knew, had played for big stakes. Damaris, he felt intuitively, young though she was, played and would play for them likewise. He looked at her with awakened speculation, awakened curiosity. What, he wondered, would come of it. Did it make her attractive or the reverse? Really he wasn't at all sure. Whereat he grew restive, the claims of inherent masculine superiority, let alone those of public school, university and an honourable profession, asserting themselves. He began to question whether this young lady did not take up an undue amount of room, thus cramping him and denying his powers of conversation suitable opportunity of display. Was not it about time gently to reduce her, relegate her to a more modest position? To achieve which laudable result—he acted, of course, for her good exclusively—he prepared to broach the subject of the unaccountable noises which disturbed his rest last night. He would cross-examine her as to their origin, thereby teasing and perhaps even discountenancing her somewhat.
But before Tom could put his benevolent scheme into execution, his attention was unexpectedly diverted, a quite new element projecting itself upon the scene.
For some little while an open boat, a hoary though still seaworthy tub of a thing, deep in draught and broad in the beam, loaded up with lobster-pots—the skeleton ribs of them black against the surrounding expanse of shining turquoise and pearl—had slowly neared the Bar from seaward. The bows, in which a small, withered old man bent double over the oars, cocked up on end. The stern, where a young man stood erect among the lobster-pots, was low in the water. Now, as the nose of the boat grounded, the young man clambered along the gunwale, and balancing for a minute, tall and straight, on the prow, took a flying leap across the wide intervening space of breaking wave and clear water, alighting on his feet, upon the firm sand beyond.
"Good for him! Neatly done," Tom Verity murmured, appreciating the grace and vigour of the action.
The young man, meanwhile, turning, called to the rower: "Thank you heartily for putting me ashore, Daddy Proud. I'll go across home by the ferry. But see here, can you manage her by yourself or shall I help shove her off for you?"
"Lord love 'ee, I can manage her sure enough," the other called back shrilly and a trifle truculently. "I knows 'er ways and she knows her master—ought to by now the old strumpet, if years count for anythink. So don't 'ee go wetting yer dandy shoes for the likes of her and me, Cap'en."
And keckling with thin wheezy laughter he straightened his back, and, planting one oar in the sand, set the boat afloat again skilfully.
Down here on the shore, in the serene morning atmosphere, voices carried with peculiar distinctness. Every word of the brief colloquy had reached Tom Verity; and one word at least possessed an Elizabethan flavour forbidden to ears Victorian, feminine and polite. Noting it Tom reddened and glanced uneasily at his companion, all inclination to tease giving place to a laudable desire to shield her from annoyance. But Damaris, judging by her demeanour, was unaware of any cause of offence; whence, with relief he concluded that either she had not heard, or that the rank expression conveyed nothing intelligible to her mind.
Her open hand pressed down upon the rough surface of the pebbles, she leaned a little backward, her lithe body twisted sideways from the waist, while she scrutinized the man upon the sands below. And that the latter presented a gallant and even distinguished appearance, though arrayed in leather-peaked cap, blue serge reefer jacket and trousers which had evidently seen service, Tom could not but admit, as he stood just clear of the ripples of incoming tide staring idly after the receding boat with its cargo of black ribbed skeleton lobster-pots.—A spirited-looking, well-made fellow, no doubt; merchant captain or more probably mate—Tom took him to be about eight-and-twenty—but in an altogether different rank of life to themselves and therefore a quite unsuitable object for prolonged and earnest attention. His advent should be treated as an accident, not elevated thus to the importance of an event. It was not quite good taste on Damaris' part Tom felt; and he made a show of rising, saying as he did so, by way of excuse:
"It is wonderfully charming out here. I am loath to break up our littletête-à-tête;but time waits for no man, worse luck, and if I am to catch my train I must start directly after luncheon. Sir Charles was good enough to promise me various letters of introduction to persons in, high places. He told me to remind him about them. I don't want to be greedy but I should like those letters. Perhaps I ought to be getting back so as to see your father about them."
But before Damaris had time to collect her thoughts and reply, the man in the peaked cap had further asserted his presence. Either becoming conscious of her observation, or caught by something in Tom Verity's speech, he wheeled round and looked up at the two in swift, almost haughty, enquiry. To Tom he vouchsafed little more than a glance, but upon Damaris his eyes fastened. For a good minute he stared at her, as though in some sort holding her to ransom. Then with an upward jerk of the head and an ejaculation, half smothered oath, half sharp laughter—as of one who registers eminently ironic conclusions—he began deliberately ascending the slope.
Tom Verity, though possessed of plentiful cheekiness towards the majority of his elders and betters, was no fire-eater. He preferred diplomacy to war; and would adroitly evade rather than invite anything approaching a scene, specially in the presence of a woman. Yet under existing circumstances retreat had become, as he perceived, not only undignified but useless. So in his best Oxford manner—a manner ornate, at that period, and quite crushingly superior—he raised his shoulders, smiled faintly, resignedly, and disposed himself in an easier attitude, saying:
"Better wait, perhaps, my dear Damaris. I would sooner risk losing those precious letters than acquire a possible escort for you—and for myself—down to the river and across the ferry."
And he threw a meaning glance over his shoulder, indicating the obtrusive stranger.
So doing he received a disturbing impression. For seen thus, at close quarters, not only was the said stranger notably, even astonishingly good-looking, but he bore an arresting likeness in build, in carriage, in expression to—
Tom paused perplexed, racking his brains.—For who, the deuce, was it? Where had he seen, and that as he could have sworn quite recently, this same forceful countenance lit by russet-grey eyes at once dauntless and sad, deep-set, well apart, the lids of them smooth and delicately moulded? The man's skin was tanned, by exposure, to a tint but a few shades lighter than that of his gold-brown beard—a beard scrupulously groomed, trimmed to a nicety and by no means deforming the lower part of the face since the line of jaw and chin remained clearly discernible.
Tom turned away and looked absently at The Hard in its broad reposeful frame of lawn and trees. The cool green foliage of a bank of hydrangeas—running from the great ilexes to the corner of the house—thick-set with discs of misty pink and blue blossom took his fancy, as contrast to the beds of scarlet and crimson geranium naming in the sun. But below any superficial sense of pleasure in outward things, thought of that likeness—and likeness, dash it all, to whom?—still vexed him as a riddle he failed to guess. Obligation to guess it, to find the right answer, obsessed him as of vital interest and importance, though, for the life of him, he could not tell why. His sense of proportion, his social sense, his self-complacency, grew restive under the pressure of it. He told himself it wasn't of the smallest consequence, didn't matter a fig, yet continued to cudgel his memory. And, all the while, the sound of deliberate footsteps crunching over the dry rattling shingle, nearer and nearer, contributed to increase his inward perturbation.
The footsteps halted close behind him—while for a sensible length of time a shadow lay across him shutting off the genial warmth—and started again, passing to the left, as the intruder traversed the crown of the ridge a few paces from where Damaris was seated, and pursued his way down to the river-shore on the other side.
"At last—I thank you!" Tom broke out impatiently.
He felt incomprehensibly nervous; and angry with himself for so feeling.
"Commend me to our friend for taking his time about things, and incidentally wasting ours—yours and mine, I mean! What on earth did he want? He certainly treated us to a sufficiently comprehensive inspection. Well, I hope he was satisfied. By the same token, have you any conception who the fellow is?"
Damaris shook her head. She, too, appeared perturbed. Her eyebrows were drawn into a little frown and her expression was perplexed to the point of child-like distress.
"Not any," she answered simply. "Some one staying at Faircloth's Inn possibly. People come there from Marychurch to spend the day during the summer. Old Timothy Proud, the lobster-catcher, who brought him round in his boat, lives at one of the cottages close to the Inn. No," she repeated, "I have no conception who he is, and yet his face seemed familiar. I had a feeling that I knew him quite well—had seen him often, oh! very often before."
"Ah! then you were puzzled by some mysterious likeness,"—Tom began eagerly, smiling at her. And stopped short, open-mouthed, assailed by so apparently preposterous a recognition that for the minute it left him fairly speechless.
But Damaris, busy with her own sensations, her glance still following the blue-clad figure along the shore and out on to the tumble-down wooden jetty, failed to remark his embarrassment and thus gave him time to recover his scattered wits.
"Jennifer is bringing the ferry-boat across," she said presently, "so you won't have to wait much longer. Not that you need be at all anxious about those letters. It is not my father's habit to forget a promise. Most likely they were written last night before he went to bed. He sleeps badly, I am sorry to say, and is glad to cheat the wakeful hours by reading and doing his correspondence until late."
As she spoke the young girl rose to her feet, pulling the close-fitting jersey down over her hips and, stooping, dusted particles of sand off the hem of her dress.
"There—that's better. Now I am tidy. Shall we go home, cousin Tom?" she asked.
Her eyes shone with inward excitement and she carried her head proudly, but her face was white. And he, sensible that she had suddenly hardened towards him and strove, he could not divine why, to keep him at arm's length, turned perversely teasing again. He would not await a more convenient season. Here and now he would satisfy his curiosity—and at her expense—regarding one at least of the queer riddles Deadham Hard had sprung on him.
"I did not know your father suffered from sleeplessness," he said. "It must be horribly trying and depressing. I am glad, in a way, you have told me, because it may account for my seeing him go out into the garden from the study last night, or rather very early this morning. It would be about two o'clock. I put down his appearance to another cause, and"—
He smiled at her, delightfully ingratiating, assaugingly apologetic.
"Shall I own it?—one which, frankly, struck me as a little upsetting and the reverse of pleasant."
"Weren't you comfortable? I am so sorry," Damaris exclaimed, instincts of hospitality instantly militant. "What was wrong? You should have called someone—rung for Hordle. What was it?"
"No—no—my dear Damaris, don't vex yourself I entreat you. I was in clover, luxuriously comfortable. You've allotted me a fascinating room and perfect dream of a bed. I feel an ungrateful wretch for so much as mentioning this matter to you after the way in which you have indulged me. Only something rather extraordinary really did happen, of which I honestly confess I am still expiring to find a reasonable and not too humiliating explanation. For, though I blush to own it"—
He laughed softly, humping up his shoulders after the manner of a naughty small boy dodging a well-merited box on the ear.—
"Yes, I blush to own it, but I was frightened, downright frightened. I quailed and I quaked. The sight of Sir Charles stepping out of the study window filled me with abject rapture. Metaphorically speaking, my craven soul squirmed at his heels. He was to me as a strong tower and house of defence.—But look here, Damaris, joking apart, tell me weren't you disturbed, didn't you hear any strange noises last night?"
"No, none." She hesitated, then with evident reluctance—"I sleep in the new wing of the house."
"Which you imply, might make a difference?" Tom asked.
"The older servants would tell you that it does."
"And you agree with them?"
Damaris had a moment of defective courage.
"I would rather not discuss the subject, cousin Tom," she said and moved away down over the shifting shingle.
At first her progress was sober, even stately. But soon, either from the steep, insecure nature of the ground or from less obvious and material cause, her pace quickened until it became a run. She ran neatly, deftly, all of a piece as a boy runs, no trace of disarray or feminine floundering in her action. More than ever, indeed, did she appear a fine nymph-like creature; so that, watching her flight Tom Verity was touched alike with self-reproach and admiration. For he had succeeded in asserting himself beyond his intention. Had overcome, had worsted her; yet, as it occurred to him, won a but barren victory. That she was alienated and resentful he could hardly doubt, while the riddle he had rather meanly used to procure her discomfiture remained unanswered as ever, dipped indeed only deeper in mystery. He was hoist with his own petard, in short; and stood there nonplussed, vexed alike at himself and at circumstance.
A soft wind, meanwhile, caressed him, as hesitating, uncertain what to do next, he glanced out over the smiling sea and then back at the delicate shore line, the white house, the huge evergreen trees and brilliant flower garden. A glamour covered the scene. It was lovely, intimately, radiantly lovely as he had lately declared it. Yet just now he grew distrustful, as though its fair seeming cloaked some subtle trickery and deceit. He began to wish he had not undertaken this expedition to Deadham; but gone straight from the normal, solidly engrained philistinism of dear old Canton Magna to join his ship. In coming here he had, to put it vulgarly, bitten off more than he could chew. For the place and its inhabitants seemed to have a disintegrating effect on him. Never in all his life had he been such a prey to exterior influences, been twisted and turned to and fro, weather-cock fashion, thus. It was absurd, of course, to take things too seriously, yet he could not but fear the Archdeacon's well-intentioned bit of worldliness and his own disposition to court whatever family prejudice pronounced taboo, were in process of leading him a very questionable little dance.
Reaction, however, set in before long, as with so lively, light-hearted a temperament, it was bound to do, the healthy scepticism, healthy optimism of untried three-and-twenty rising to the surface buoyant as a cork.
Tom Verity shook himself, took off his hat, smoothed his hair, settled his tie, hitched up the waist of his trousers, stamping to get them into place, laughed a little, calling himself every sort of silly ass, and then swung away down the side of the long ridge in pursuit of Damaris. He acknowledged his treatment of her had been lacking in chivalry. He hadn't shown himself altogether considerate or even kind. But she challenged him—perhaps unconsciously—and once or twice had come near making him feel small.—Oh! there were excuses for his behaviour! Now however he would sail on another tack. Would placate, discreetly cherish her until she couldn't but be softened and consent to make it up. After all maidens of her still tender age are not precisely adamant—such at least was his experience—where a personable youth is concerned. It only needed a trifle of refined cajolery to make everything smooth and to bring her round.
He overtook the fugitive as she reached the low wooden jetty crawling, like some giant but rather dilapidated black many-legged insect, out over the stream. Its rows of solidly driven piles were intact, but the staging they supported had suffered damage from the rush of river floods, let alone from neglect and age. Handrails were broken down, planks rotted and wrenched away leaving gaps through which the cloudy greenish blue water could be seen as it purred and chuckled beneath. Here, at the river level, it was hot to the point of sultriness, the air heavy, even stagnant, since the Bar shut off the southerly breeze.
"Upon my word one requires to be in training to race you, my dear Damaris," the young man said gaily, ostentatiously mopping his forehead. "And I'm disgracefully soft just now, I know. You beat me utterly and ignominiously; but then you did have a good three minutes' start. In common honesty you can't deny that"—
The girl made no response, but began mounting the few sand-strewn steps on to the jetty. He saw her face in profile, the delicate upward curve of her long dark eyelashes in the shade of her hat. Saw, too, that her soft lips quivered as with the effort to repress an outburst of tears. And this affected him as the wounding of some strong free creature might, stirring his blood in a fashion new to him and strange. For not only did he find it piteous; but unseemly, unpermissible somehow, yet marvellously sweet, startling him out of all preconceived light diplomatic plans, plucking shrewdly at his complacently unawakened heart.
He came close to her, and putting his hand under her elbow gently held it.
"Pray, pray be careful," he said. "I don't trust this crazy little pier of yours one atom. Any one of these boards looks capable of crumbling and letting one through.—And, Damaris, please don't be cross with me or I shall be quite miserable. Forgive my having asked you stupid questions. I was a blundering idiot. Of course, what I heard last night was just some echo, some trick of wind or of the river and tide. I was half asleep and imagined the whole thing most likely, magnified sounds as one does, don't you know, sometimes at night. Your father talked wonderfully, and I went to bed dazzled, such imagination as I possess all aflame"—
But Damaris shook her head, while her elbow rested rigid upon the palm of his hand.
"No—what you heard was real," she answered. "I heard once myself—and the people here know about it. They say the dead smugglers still drive their ponies up from the beach, across the lawn where the old road was, and, as it sounds, through the round rooms downstairs, in which my father lives, on their way up into the forest.—You cannot help seeing—although you see nothing—how the ponies are ill-used, hounded and flogged. The last of the drove are lame and utterly worn out. They stumble along anyhow and one falls. Oh! it is cruel, wicked. And it is—was, really true, cousin Tom. It must have happened scores of times before old Mr. Verity, your namesake, put a stop to the iniquity by buying The Hard—I have only heard the ponies driven once, about this time in September last year—just before something very sad, quite of my own, happened"—
Damaris stopped, her lips quivering again and too much for speech.
"Don't tell me any more. I can't bear you to be distressed. Pray, pray don't"—the young man urged incoherently while his grasp on her elbow tightened somewhat.
For he felt curiously flurried and put about; near cursing himself moreover for having helped to break up her high serenity thus. The whole thing was manifestly impossible as he told himself, outside every recognized law of Nature and sound science. Even during the mistrustful phantasy-breeding watches of the night, when reason inclines to drag anchor setting mind and soul rather wildly adrift, he had refused credence to the apparent evidence of his own senses. Now in broad daylight, the generous sunshine flooding him, the smooth river purring and glittering at his feet, belief in grim and ghostly happenings became more than ever inadmissible, not to say quite arrantly grotesque. Yet Damaris' version of those same happenings tallied with his own in every point. And that her conviction of their reality was genuine, profound indeed to the point of pain, admitted neither of question nor of doubt.
William Jennifer, who successfully combined in his single person the varied offices of ferryman, rat-catcher, jobbing gardener, amateur barber, mender of sails and of nets, brought the heavy, flat-bottomed boat alongside the jetty. Shipping the long sweeps, he coughed behind his hand with somewhat sepulchral politeness to give warning of his presence.
"Sweethearting—lost to sight and hearing, espoused to forgetfulness," he murmured, peering up at the two cousins standing in such close proximity to one another upon the black staging above.
For William Jennifer was a born lover of words and maker of phrases, addicted to the bandying of pleasantries, nicely seasoned to their respective age, sex and rank, with all he met; and, when denied an audience, rather than keep silence holding conversation with himself.
The hot morning induced thirst, which, being allayed by a couple of pints at Faircloth's Inn, induced desire for a certain easiness of costume. His waistcoat hung open—he had laid aside his coat—displaying a broad stitched leather belt that covered the junction between buff corduroy trousers and blue-checked cotton shirt. On his head, a high thimble-crowned straw hat, the frayed brim of it pulled out into a poke in front for the better shelter of small, pale twinkling eyes set in a foxy face.
The said face, however—for all its sharp-pointed nose, long upper lip, thin gossipy mouth, tucked in at the corners and opening, redly cavernous, without any showing of teeth, a stiff sandy fringe edging cheeks and chin from ear to ear—could on occasion become utterly blank of expression. It became so now, as Tom Verity, realizing the fact of its owner's neighbourhood, moved a step or two away from Damaris and, jumping on board himself, proceeded with rather studied courtesy to hand her down into the boat.
"Looks as there might have been a bit of a tiff betwixt 'em"—Thus Jennifer inwardly. Then aloud—"Put you straight across the ferry, sir, or take you to the breakwater at The Hard? The tide's on the turn, so we'd slip down along easy and I'm thinking that 'ud spare Miss Verity the traipse over the shore path. Wonnerful parching in the sun it is for the latter end of September."
"Oh! to the breakwater by all means," Tom answered with alacrity.
For reaction had set in. Not only was the young man still slightly flustered, but vexed by the liveliness of his own emotions. Everything to-day savoured of exaggeration. The most ordinary incidents distended, inflated themselves in a really unaccountable manner. So that, frankly, he fought shy of finding himself alone with Damaris again. She seemed so constantly to betray him into ill-regulated feeling, ill-considered speech and action, which tended to endanger the completeness of his self-esteem. Therefore, although admitting his attitude to be scantily heroic, he welcomed the prospect of the ferryman's chaperonage until such time as her father or her discarded lady-in-waiting, the innocent and pink-nosed Bilson, should effect his final deliverance.
"Yes, it is uncommonly hot," he repeated, while, with both arms extended, he worked to keep the side of the boat from bumping against the range of piles, backing it clear of the jetty into the fairway of the river. He found exertion pleasant, steadying.
"Neither Miss Verity nor I shall be sorry to be saved the walk along that basting path. That is," he added, smiling with disarming good-temper, "if we're not blocking business and keeping you too long away from the ferry."
But Jennifer, mightily pleased at his company and having, moreover, certain scandalous little fishes of his own to fry—or attempt to fry—waved the objection aside.
The ferry could very well mind itself for a while, he said; and if anyone should come along they must just hold hands with patience till he got back, that was all. But passengers were few and far between this time of year and of day. The "season"—as was the new-fangled fashion to call it—being now over; trippers tripped home again to wheresoever their natural habitat might be. The activities of boys' schools, picnic parties, ambulant scientific societies and field-clubs—out in pursuit of weeds, of stone-cracking, and the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being. Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox.
Not that he, Jennifer, as he explained, owned to any quarrel with the alien invasion. Good for trade they were, that tripper lot, though wonnerful simple, he must say, when they came to talk, blessed with an almighty wide swallow for any long-eared fairy tale you liked to put on them. Mortal full of senseless questions, too, fit to make anybody laugh!—Whereat overcome by joyous memories of human folly, he opened the red cavern of his apparently toothless mouth, barking up audible mirth, brief and husky, from the depth of a beer-slaked throat.
He leaned forward while speaking, resting chest and elbows on the oars—only now and again dipping the blades in the water to steady the boat in its course as it moved smoothly onward borne by brimming stream and tide. From out the shadow of his thimble-crowned hat he looked up knowingly, with the freemasonry of assured good-temper at Tom, who stood before him hands in pockets, friendly and debonair, class distinctions for the moment quite forgot. For, let alone immediate convenience of chaperonage, the young man found unexpected entertainment in this typical South Saxon, relic, as it struck him, of a bygone age and social order. Might not that tough and somewhat clumsy body, that crafty, jovial, yet non-committal countenance, have transferred themselves straight from the pages of Geoffrey Chaucer into nineteenth-century life? Here, was a master of primitive knowledge and of arts not taught in modern Board (or any other) Schools; a merry fellow too, who could, as Tom divined, when company and circumstances allowed, be broadly, unprintably humorous.
So, in this last connection perhaps, it was just as well that Damaris still appeared somewhat implacable. Coming on board she had passed Jennifer—who rowed amidships—and gone right forward, putting as wide a distance as conditions permitted between her cousin and herself. Now, as she sat on a pile of red-brown seine nets in the bow of the boat, she kept her face averted, looking away down the cool liquid highway, and presenting to his observation a graceful, white-clad but eminently discouraging back. Her attitude repelled rather than invited advances, so at least Tom, watching her, certainly thought. This justified his not following her but staying where he was, and leaving her to herself. Whereupon annoyance again beset him; for it was very little to his credit to have mismanaged his dealings with her and alienated her sympathies thus. With her, it was very evident, he had not been at all a success. And it pricked his young vanity very shrewdly not to be a success.
From these unsatisfactory reflections William Jennifer's voice, prefaced by a warning cough, recalled him.
"Making any long stay in these parts, sir?" he enquired.
And when Tom explained that a few hours from now would witness the termination of his visit, and that, in all probability, many years of absence from England lay ahead—
"Indeed, indeed, to be sure. Who'd have thought it for a young gentleman of the quality-like yourself! But, there, some are born under the traveller's star, sir—created with a roving spirit. And the Lord help 'em, I say, for they're so made as to be powerless to help themselves seemingly. Rove they must and will, if they are to taste any contentment—an itch in their feet from the cradle nought but foreign lands'll serve to pacify. The sight of the ocean now, seems fairly tormenting to 'em till they can satisfy themselves of what's on the far side of it."
But, here, the boat being unduly drawn aside by the suck of some local current, Jennifer was constrained to apply his mind to navigation. He dipped the long sweeps, and with a steady powerful pull straightened the course to midstream. Then raising the glistening blades, off which the water dripped white and pattering, he leaned forward again, resting elbows and chest on the butt-end of the oars, and once more addressed himself to polite conversation.
"Not as I've been greatly troubled that way myself. Had my chance of going to sea and welcome many's the time when I was a youngster. But always a one for the land, I was. Never had any special fancy for salt water, though I do make my living of it now, as you may say, in a sense."
During this biographical excursion Tom Verity's attention wandered. His eyes dwelt on Damaris. She had altered her position turning half round as she scanned the strip of sandy warren with its row of sentinel Scotch firs bordering the river. Seen thus, three-quarter face, Tom realized suddenly not only how really beautiful she was—or rather could at moments be—but how strangely she resembled Sir Charles her father. There was likeness not of features alone; but, for all her youthful freshness, a reflection of his strength, his inscrutability. Whereupon rather unworthy curiosity reawoke in Tom Verity, to satisfy which he was tempted to descend to methods not entirely loyal.
Damaris, sitting to windward, must be out of earshot assuredly, yet he lowered his voice as he said:
"By the way, talking of going to sea, can you tell me anything about the young sailor whom you took across the ferry just before fetching Miss Verity and me? I am pretty sure I have met him before and yet I can't place him somehow."
Jennifer shot a sharply enquiring glance at the speaker; for here, at first sight, appeared rare opportunity of that same coveted and scandalous fish-frying! Yet he debated the wisdom of immediate indulgence in that merry pastime, inherent suspicion of class for class, suspicion too, of this young gentleman's conspicuously easy, good-natured manner, preaching caution. A show of friendliness supplies fine cover for the gaining of one's own ends.—Hadn't he, Jennifer, practised the friendly manoeuvre freely enough himself on occasion? And he did not in the least relish the chance of walking into a trap, instead of jovially baiting one. So he dipped the oars again, and answered slowly as though the question taxed his memory sorely, his face vacant of expression as an empty plate.
"Brought him across before I started to fetch you and the young lady, sir, did I? To be sure, there, let me see. I've had several sea-going chaps of sorts back and forth this morning. Come and go most days, they do, come and go without my taking any particular account—the Lord forgive me, for it ain't over civil—unless strangers should hail me, or someone out of the common such as Miss Verity and yourself. A passing show, sir, half the time those I carry; no more to me, bless you, than so many sand-fleas a-hopping on the beach.—Mr. Blackmore—coast-guard officer he is—I fetched him across early, with one of his men coming round from the Head. And that poor lippity-lop, Abram Sclanders' eldest.—Pity he wasn't put away quiet-like at birth!—Terrible drag he is on Abram and always will be. Anybody with an ounce of gumption might have seen he'd be a short-wit from the first.—I took him over; but that 'ud the opposite way about, as he wanted to go shrimping back of the Bar so he said."
Jennifer paused as in earnest thought.
"No, not a soul to merit your attention, to-day, sir, that I can call to mind. Unless"—with an upward look of returning intelligence—"but that ain't very likely either—unless it should be Darcy Faircloth. I'd clean forgot him, so I had. Cap'en Faircloth, as some is so busy calling 'im, now, in season and out of season till it's fairly fit to make you laugh.—Remarkable tall, Johnny-head-in-air young feller with a curly yaller beard to him."
"That's the man!" Tom exclaimed.
He had distrusted Jennifer's show of ignorance, believing he was being fenced with, played with, even royally lied to; but this merely served to heighten his curiosity and amusement. Something of moment must lie, he felt, behind so much wandering talk, something of value, purposely and cunningly withheld until time was ripe for telling disclosure.
"Darcy Faircloth—Captain Faircloth?" he could not but repeat, and with such honest puzzlement and evident desire for further enlightening as to overcome his hearer's hesitation.
"No—not a likely person for you to be in any wise acquainted with, sir," Jennifer returned, wary still, though yielding—"even if you didn't happen to be a bit new to Deadham yourself, as I may put it. For been away mostly from his natural home here, young Faircloth has, ever since he was a little shaver. Mrs. Faircloth—owns the Inn there and all the appurtenances thereof, sheds, cottages, boats, and suchlike, she does—always had wonnerful high views for him. Quite the gentleman Darcy must be, with a boarding school into Southampton and then the best of the Merchant Service—no before the mast for him, bless you. There was a snug little business to count on, regular takings in the public, week in and week out—more particularly of late years in the summer—let alone the rest of the property—he being the only son of his mother, too, and she a widow woman free to follow any whimsies as took her about the lad."
Jennifer gave some slow, strong strokes, driving the lumbering boat forward till the water fairly hissed against its sides. And Tom Verity still listened, strangely, alertly interested, convinced there was more, well worth hearing, to follow.
"Oh! there's always bin a tidy lot of money behind young Darcy, and is yet I reckon, Mrs. Faircloth being the first-class business woman she is. Spend she may with one hand, but save, and make, she does and no mistake, Lord love you, with the other. Singular thing though," he added meditatively, his face growing wholly expressionless, "how little Darcy, now he's growed up, features old Lemuel his father. Squinny, red-cheeked little old party, he was; thin as a herring, and chilly, always chilly, sitting over the fire in the bar-parlour winter and summer too—small squeaky voice he had minding any one of a penny whistle. But a warm man and a close one—oh! very secret. Anybody must breakfast overnight and hurry at that—eat with their loins girded, as you may say, to get upsides with old Lemuel."
He ceased speaking, and glanced round over his shoulder calculating the distance to the breakwater, for the boat drew level with the sea-wall of rough-hewn pinkish-grey granite along the river frontage of The Hard gardens.
"There's some as 'ud tell you it was the surprise of old Lemuel's life to find himself a parent," he added, eyeing Tom slyly as he spoke, his mouth remaining open as in preparation for coming laughter.
For those same scandalous little fishes were well into the frying-pan, now—sizzling, frizzling. And this was a vastly agreeable moment to William Jennifer, worth waiting for, worth scheming for. Unprintable humour looked out of his twinkling eyes while he watched to see how far Tom Verity caught his meaning. Then as the young man flushed, sudden distaste, even a measure of shame invading him, Jennifer, true artist in scandal, turned the conversation aside with an air of indulgent apology.
"But, lor, there, you know how people'll talk in a little country place where there ain't much doing!—And it ain't for me to speak of what happened back in those times, being barely out of my teens then and away cow-keeping over Alton way for Farmer Whimsett. Regular chip of the old block, he was. Don't breed that sort nowadays. As hearty as you like, and swallered his three pints of home-brewed every morning with his breakfast he did, till he was took off quite sudden in his four-score-and-ten twelve months ago come Michaelmas."
Upon the terrace, by the pyramid of ball and the two little cannons, Sir Charles Verity stood, holding a packet of newly written letters in his hand and smoking, while he watched the approaching boat. Damaris rose from the pile of red-brown fishing-nets and waved to him. Jennifer, too, glanced up, steadying both oars with one hand while he raised the other to the brim of his thimble-crowned hat. A couple of minutes more and he would part company with his passenger, and so judged it safe to indulge himself with a final fish-frying.
"Mortal fine figure of a man, Sir Charles even yet," he said to Tom admiringly. "But anybody should have seen him as a young gentleman. When he used to visit here in old Mr. Verity's time, none in the country-side could hold a candle to him for looks, as you may say. Turned the females' heads he did. Might have had his pick of the lot, maids and wives alike for 'arf a word. Well, good-bye to you, sir"—and, as certain coin changed hands—"thank ye, sir, kindly. Wish you a pleasant voyage and a rare good picking up of honours and glories, and gold and silver likewise, there across the seas and oceans where you're a-going to."
It was afternoon, about five o'clock. The fine September weather, hot and cloudless, lasted still. The air was heavy with garden scents, the aromatic sweetness of sun-baked gorse and pine-scrub on the warren, and with the reek off the mud-flats of the Haven, the tide being low. Upon the sandy skirts of the Bar, across the river just opposite, three cormorants—glossy black against the yellow—postured in extravagant angular attitudes drying their wings. Above the rim of the silver-blue sea—patched with purple stains in the middle distance—webs of steamer smoke lay along the southern sky. Occasionally a sound of voices, the creak of a wooden windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as it was wound slowly up the foreshore, came from the direction of the ferry and of Faircloth's Inn. The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted breath of the mud-flats a wholesome reminder of original sin.
Under these conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her own much wondering soul.
For Sir Charles was away, staying with an old friend and former brother-in-arms, Colonel Carteret, for a week's partridge shooting over the Norfolk stubble-fields. Sport promised to be good, and Damaris had great faith in Colonel Carteret. With him her father was always amused, contented, safe. Hordle was in attendance, too, so she knew his comfort in small material matters to be secure. She could think of him without any shadow of anxiety, her mind for once at rest. And this she enjoyed. For it is possible to miss a person badly, long for their return ardently, yet feel by no means averse to a holiday from more active expenditure of love on their account.
And Theresa Bilson—pleasing thought!—was, for the moment, absent also, having gone to tea with the Miss Minetts. Two maiden ladies, these, of uncertain age, modest fortune and unimpeachable refinement, once like Theresa herself, members of the scholastic profession; but now, thanks to the timely death of a relative—with consequent annuities and life interest in a ten-roomed, stone-built house of rather mournful aspect in Deadham village—able to rest from their ineffectual labours, support the Church, patronize their poorer and adulate their richer neighbours to their guileless hearts' content.
Gentility exuded from the Miss Minetts, and—if it is permissible slightly to labour the simile—their pores were permanently open. Owing both to her antecedent and existing situation, it may be added, Theresa Bilson was precious in their sight. For had she not in the past, like themselves, sounded the many mortifications of a governess' lot; and was she not now called up higher, promoted indeed to familiar, almost hourly, intercourse with the great? Miss Felicia Verity was known to treat her with affection. Mrs. Augustus Cowden, that true blue of county dames and local aristocrats, openly approved her. She sat daily at Sir Charles Verity's table and helped to order his household. What more genuine patents of gentility could be asked? So they listened with a pleasure, deep almost to agitation, to her performances upon the piano, her reminiscences of Bonn and the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, to her anecdotes of life at The Hard and of its distinguished owner's habits and speech. Thus, by operation of the fundamental irony resident in things, did Theresa Bilson, of all improbable and inadequate little people, become to the Miss Minetts as a messenger of the gods; exciting in them not only dim fluttering apprehensions of the glories of art and delights of foreign travel, but—though in their determined gentility they knew it not—of the primitive allurements and mysteries of sex.
The moral effect of this friendship upon Theresa herself was not, however, of the happiest. Fired by their interest in her recitals she was tempted to spread herself. At first almost unconsciously, for by instinct she was truthful, she embroidered fact, magnifying her office not only in respect of her ex-pupil Damaris but of Damaris' father also. She represented herself as indispensable to both parent and child, until she more than half believed that flattering fiction. She began to reckon herself an essential element in the establishment at The Hard, the pivot indeed upon which it turned. Whereupon a rather morbid craving for the Miss Minetts' society developed in her. For, with those two credulous ladies as audience, she could fortify herself in delusion by recounting all manner of episodes and incidents not as they actually had, but as she so ardently desired they might have, taken place.—A pathetic form of lying this, though far from uncommon to feminine and—more especially—spinster practice and habit!
Still Theresa was not so besotted but that lucid intervals now and again afflicted her. One seized her this afternoon, as she prepared to bid Damaris good-bye. Either conscience pricked with unusual sharpness, or the young girl's smiling and unruffled acquiescence in her departure aroused latent alarms. She began to excuse her action in leaving her charge thus solitary, to protest her devotion; becoming, it may be added, red and agitated in the process. Her thick, short little fingers worked nervously on the crook handle of her white cotton umbrella. Her round light-coloured eyes grew humid to the point of fogging the lenses of her gold-rimmed glasses.
"But why should you worry so now, just as you are starting, Billy?" Damaris reasoned, with the rather cruel logic of cool eighteen in face of hot and flustered nine-and-thirty. "Only at luncheon you were telling me how much you always enjoy spending an afternoon at the Grey House. I thought you looked forward so much to going. What has happened to turn you all different, like this, at the last minute?"
"Nothing has happened exactly; but I have scruples about visiting my own friends and letting you remain alone when Sir Charles is from home. It might appear a dereliction of duty—as though I took advantage of his absence."
"Nobody would think anything so foolish," Damaris declared. "And then you knew he would be away this week when you made the engagement."
Theresa gulped and prevaricated.
"No, surely not—I must have mistaken the date."
"But you were quite happy at luncheon, and you couldn't have mistaken the date then," Damaris persisted.
Whereupon poor Theresa lost herself, the worthy and unworthy elements in her nature alike conspiring to her undoing. In her distraction she sniffed audibly. A tear ran down either side of her pink shiny nose and dropped on the folds of shepherd's-plaid silk veiling her plump bosom. For, with some obscure purpose of living up to her self-imposed indispensability, Miss Bilson was distinctly dressy at this period, wearing her best summer gown on every possible occasion and tucking a bunch of roses or carnations archly in her waist-belt.
"Do you think it kind to insist so much on my passing forgetfulness?" she quavered. "The habit of criticizing and cavilling at whatever I say grows on you, Damaris, and it so increases the difficulties of my position. I know I am sensitive, but that is the result of my affection for you. I care so deeply, and you are not responsive. You chill me. As I have told dear Miss Felicia—for I must sometimes unburden myself"—
This hastily, as Damaris' eyes darkened with displeasure.
—"For the last year, ever since you have nominally been out of the schoolroom, I have seen my influence over you lessen, and especially since poor Mrs. Watson's death"—
"We will not talk about Nannie, please," Damaris said quietly.
"Yes, but—as I told your Aunt Felicia—since then I have tried more than ever to win your entire confidence, to make up to you for the loss of poor Watson and fill her place with you."
"No one else can ever fill the place of the person one has loved," Damaris returned indignantly. "It isn't possible. I should be ashamed to let it be possible. Nannie was Nannie—she had cared for me all my life and I had cared for her. She belongs to things about which you"—
And there the girl checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—past, present, and prospective—is unchivalrous, not to say downright mean-spirited. So Damaris, swiftly repentant, put her arm round the heaving shoulders, bent her handsome young head and kissed the uninvitingly dabby cheek—a caress surely counting to her for righteousness.
"Don't find fault with me any more, Billy," she said. "Indeed I never hurt you on purpose. But there are such loads of things to think about, that I get absorbed in them and can't attend sometimes directly on the minute."
"Absent-mindedness should be corrected rather than encouraged," MissBilson announced, sententious even amid her tears.
"Oh! it amounts to more than absent-mindedness I'm afraid—a sort of absent-every-thingedness when it overtakes me. For the whole of me seems to go away and away, hand in hand and all together," Damaris said, her eyes alight with questions and with dreams. "But don't let us discuss that now," she added. "It would waste time, and it is you who must go away and away, Billy, if you are not to put the poor Miss Minetts into a frantic fuss by being late for tea. They will think some accident has happened to you. Don't beep them in suspense, it is simply barbarous.—Good-bye, and don't hurry back. I have heaps to amuse me. I'll not expect you till dinner-time."
Thus did it come about that Damaris reposed in a deck chair, under the shade of the great ilex trees, gazing idly at the webs of steamer smoke hanging low in the southern sky, at the long yellow-grey ridge of the Bar between river and sea, and at the cormorants posturing in the hot afternoon sunshine upon the sand.
Truly she was free to send forth her soul upon whatever far fantastic journey she pleased. But souls are perverse, not to be driven at will, choosing their own times and seasons for travel. And hers, just now, proved obstinately home-staying—had no wings wherewith to fly, but must needs crawl a-fourfoot, around all manner of inglorious personal matters. For that skirmish with her ex-governess, though she successfully bridled her tongue and conquered by kindness rather than by smiting, had clouded her inward serenity, not only by its inherent uselessness, but by reminding her indirectly of an occurrence which it was her earnest desire to forget.
Indirectly, mention of her beloved nurse, Sarah Watson—who journeying back from a visit to her native Lancashire, just this time last year, had met death swift and hideous in a railway collision—recalled to Damaris the little scene, of a week ago, with Tom Verity when ho had asked her, in the noonday sunshine out on the Bar, for some explanation of his strange nocturnal experience. She went hot all over now, with exaggerated childish shame, thinking of it. For had not she, Damaris Verity, though nurtured in the creed that courage is the source and mother of all virtues, shown the white feather, incontinently turned tail and run away? Remembrance of that running scorched her, so that more than once, awakening suddenly in the night, her fair young body was dyed rose-red with the disgrace of it literally from head to heel. She was bitterly humiliated by her own poltroonery, ingenuously doubtful as to whether she could ever quite recover her self-respect; glad that every day put two hundred miles and more of sea between her and Tom Verity, since he had witnessed that contemptible fall from grace.
Nevertheless, after her first consternation—in which, to avoid further speech with him she had sought refuge among the unsavoury seine nets in the fore-part of Jennifer's ferry-boat—Tom Verity's probable opinion of her undignified action troubled her far less than the cause of the said action itself. For exactly what, after all, had so upset her, begetting imperative necessity of escape? Not the apparent confirmation of that ugly legend concerning ghostly ponies driven up across The Hard garden from the shore. From childhood, owing both to temperament and local influences, her apprehension of things unseen and super-normal had been remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort. She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell upon or talk of them.—Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body, are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer's sixth sense.—For while, in never doubting their existence her reason acquiesced, her heart turned away, oppressed and disquieted, as from other mysterious actualities common enough to human observation, such as illness, disease, deformity, old age, the pains of birth and of death. Such matters might perplex and sadden, or arouse her indignant pity; but, being strong with the confidence of untouched youth and innocence, they were powerless, in and by themselves, to terrify her to the contemptible extremity of headlong flight.
This she recognized, though less by reasoning than by instinct; and so found herself compelled to search deeper for the cause of her recent disgrace. Not that she willingly prosecuted that search; but that the subject pursued her, simply refusing to leave her alone. Continually it presented itself to her mind, and always with the same call for escape, the same foreboding of some danger against which she must provide. Always, too, it seemed to hinge upon Tom Verity's visit, and something in her relation to the young man himself which she could not define. She revolved the question now—Theresa being safely packed off to her tea-party—in shade of the ilex trees, with solemn eyes and finely serious face.
There was not anything unusual in receiving visitors at The Hard. Men came often to see her father, and she took her share in entertaining all such comers as a matter of course. Some she "didn't much care about," some she liked. But, with the exception of Colonel Carteret from childhood her trusted friend and confidant, their coming and going was just part of the accustomed routine, a survival from the life at the Indian summer palace of long ago, and made no difference. Yet, though she was still uncertain whether she did like Tom Verity or not, his coming and going had indisputably made a difference. It marked, indeed, a new departure in her attitude and thought. Her world, before his advent, was other than that in which she now dwelt.
For one thing, Tom was much younger than the majority of her father's guests—a man not made but still early in the making, the glamour of promise rather than the stark light of finality upon him. This affected her; for at eighteen, a career, be it never so distinguished, which has reached its zenith, in other words reached the end of its tether, must needs have a touch of melancholy about it. With the heat of going on in your own veins, the sight of one who has no further go strikes chill to the heart. And so, while uncertain whether she quite trusted him or not, Damaris—until the unlucky running away episode—had taken increasing pleasure in this new cousin's company. It both interested and diverted her. She had not only felt ready to talk to him; but,—surprising inclination!—once the ice of her natural reserve broken, to talk to him about herself.
Half-shyly she dwelt upon his personal appearance.—A fine head and clever face, the nose astute, slightly Jewish in type, so she thought. His eyes were disappointing, too thickly brown in colour, too opaque. They told you nothing, were indeed curiously meaningless; and, though well set under an ample brow, were wanting in depth and softness owing to scantiness of eyelash. But his chin satisfied her demands. It was square, forcible, slightly cleft; and his mouth, below the fly-away reddish moustache, was frankly delightful.—Damaris flushed, smiling to herself now as she recalled his smile. Whereupon the humiliation of that thrice wretched running away took a sharper edge. For she realized, poor child, how much—notwithstanding her proud little snubbing of him—she coveted his good opinion, wished him to admire and to like her; wanted, even while she disapproved his self-complacency and slightly doubted his truthfulness, to have him carry with him a happy impression of her—carry it with him to that enchanted far Eastern land in which all the poetry of her childhood had its root. For, if remembrance of her remained with him, and that agreeably, she herself also found "Passage to India" in a sense. And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy—or would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable flight.—Oh! what—what made her run away? From what had she thus run? If she could only find out! And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.