"Give me a kiss, Nelly," he said, "and I will go. Just one kiss. I shall never have another in all my days. Good-bye, my heart's delight."
For a second their lips clung together. Then his arms relaxed. He put her down gently into a chair. She lay back with closed eyes. She heard the door shut behind her. Then she sprang to her feet, realising that he was gone and it was too late to recall him.
Why should he go? she asked herself, as, with trembling hands, she arranged the disorder of her hair. Then the merely conventional came in, as it will even at such tense moments. She asked herself how she would look to his sister, if she appeared at this moment; to the maid, who might be expected at any moment bringing in the lamp. The room was dark but for the firelight. How would she look, with her tear-stained visage and the disorder of her appearance? She could not sit and make small talk. That was a heroism beyond her. And she was afraid to speak to anyone lest she should break down. She adopted a cowardly course. Afterwards she must explain it to Mrs. Rooke somehow. She put the consideration of how out of sight: it could wait till the turmoil of her thoughts was over.
She stole from the room, let herself out quietly, and was grateful for the dark and the cool, frosty air. About five minutes after she had gone Mrs. Rooke came in laden with small parcels.
"The Captain and Miss Drummond are in the drawing-room, ma'am," said the maid.
"Then you can bring tea."
Mrs. Rooke opened the drawing-room door leisurely, turning the handle once or twice before she did so. She was excited at the thought of the things that might be happening the other side of the door. Supposing that Nelly had discovered that life with a poor foot-captain was a more desirable thing than life with a well-endowed baronet, a coming man in the political world to boot! Supposing—there was no end to the suppositions that passed through Mrs. Rooke's busy brain in a few seconds of time. Then—she entered the room and found emptiness.
"You are sure that neither the Captain nor Miss Drummond left a message?" she said to the maid who brought the tea.
"Quite sure, ma'am. I had no idea they were gone."
"Do you suppose they went away together, Jane?"
Mrs. Rooke was ready to accept a crumb of possible comfort from her handmaid.
"I do remember now, ma'am, that when I was pulling down the blind upstairs I heard the hall-door shut twice. I never thought of looking in the drawing-room, ma'am. I made sure that the noise of the blinds had deceived me into taking next-door for ours."
"Ah, thank you, Jane, that will do."
The omens were not at all propitious. Mrs. Rooke was fain to acknowledge as much to herself dejectedly. Nor did Cyprian think them propitious when taken into counsel. When she went downstairs, she found that her brother had come in. He was to spend the last evening at his sister's house.
Captain Langrishe's face, however, did not invite questions. He made no allusion at all to the happenings of the afternoon, and his sister felt that she could not ask him. She had a heavy heart for him as she bade him good-night, although she called something after him with a cheerful pretence about their rendezvous next morning.
"Itisnine-thirty at Fenchurch Street, isn't it?" she asked.
"Do you think you will ever manage it, Bel?" Captain Langrishe smiled at her haggardly.
"Oh, yes, easily—by staying up all night," she answered.
But her heart was as heavy as lead for him.
When Sir Denis came home from his club that evening he learned that Miss Nelly had gone to bed with a headache.
Pat, who told him, looked away as he gave the information, as though he did not believe in his own words. Miss Nelly with a headache! Why, God bless her, she had never had such a thing, not from the day she was born! To be sure, the whole affectionate household knew that there was some cloud over Miss Nelly. They didn't talk much about it. Pat and Bridget knew better than to have the servants' hall gossiping over the master and Miss Nelly. A new under-housemaid, who was greatly addicted to the reading of penny novelettes, suggested that Miss Nelly was being forced into marrying her cousin by the machinations of his mother, who was notpersona gratawith the servants' hall. But Pat had nipped the young person's imaginings in the bud.
"She may be contrairy enough to give the General the gout in his big toe and the twisht in his timper, as often she's done. But she can't make our Miss Nelly marry where she don't like. If you'd put your romantic notions into your scrubbin' now, Miss Higgs; but I suppose it's your name is the matter with you, and you can't help it."
The under-housemaid, whose name happened to be Gladys Higgs, was reduced to tears by this remark, and the tears brought the kind-hearted Pat to repentance for his hastiness.
"Whatever the dickens came over me," he imparted to Bridget when they were having a snack of bread and cheese between meals in the room allotted to the cook, who was now also housekeeper, "to go sharpenin' my tongue on that foolish little girl? It isn't for you an' me to be makin' fun of their quare names. 'Tis no credit to us if we have elegant names in the counthry we come from."
"Aye, indeed. Where would you find pleasanter thin MacGeoghegan or McGroarty or Magillacuddy? There was a polisman in our town by the name of McGuffin. I always thought it real pleasant."
"Sure what would be on the little girl?—'tis Miss Nelly, I mean," said Pat, in a manner that showed his real anxiety. "She scared me, so she did, with her nonsense, that Gladys. For it stands to reason that Miss Nelly wouldn't mind marryin' Sir Robin—isn't he the fittest match for her?—if it wasn't that there might be someone else. And who could it be, I ask you, unbeknownst to us that has watched over her from a babby?"
"You're a foolish man to be takin' that much notice of that Gladys girl and her talk. Why shouldn't Miss Nelly have a headache? Why, I remember the Miss O'Flahertys, Lord Dunshanbo's daughters, when I was a little girl; and 'twas faintin' on the floor they were every other minute and everyone havin' to run and cut their stay-laces. They were fifty, too, if they were a day, so they ought to have had more sense. Why wouldn't Miss Nelly have Quality ways?"
"Young ladies aren't like that nowadays," Pat said dolefully. "'Tis the bicycle and the golf. They've no stay-laces to cut, so they don't go faintin' away. And Miss Nelly, poor lamb, she'd never be thinkin' of doing such a thing."
He went off sorrowfully, shaking his head. The mysteriousness of the change in Miss Nelly perturbed him the more. He looked away from the General when he gave the information about the headache.
"Miss Nelly said, sir," he volunteered, "that she was to be called, unless she was asleep, when you came home to dinner. Shall I send up Fanny to call her?"
"Not for worlds," said the General. "I'll go myself. She mustn't be disturbed, poor child, if she has a headache."
He went upstairs softly, pursing out his lips as he went along in troubled thought. He opened the door of his daughter's room, and spoke her name in a whisper. There was not a sound.
"Fast asleep," he said, with a sigh, as he went to his dressing-room to dress for dinner. That was something he would not have omitted for any possible calamity that could befall him.
He ate his dinner in lonely state. Bridget had done her best by way of expressing her sympathy, but he ate without his usual enjoyment.
"Sure," said Pat afterwards, "he didn't know but what it was sawdust he was atin' instead of that beautiful volly-vong of yours. He could barely touch the mutton, and a beautiful little joint it was. Sure, there's a sad change come over the house, anyway."
The General gave orders that Miss Nelly was not to be disturbed again that night. After dinner he retired to his den and made a pretence of reading the papers, but his heart wasn't in it. He missed even a speech of Robin's which would have enraged him in happier times. He sat turning over the sheets and sighing to himself now and again; only when Pat came in with a pretence of replenishing the fire—it was Pat's way of showing his silent sympathy—was the General absorbed in his newspaper. Not that it imposed on Pat, who mentioned afterwards to Bridget that he didn't believe the master knew a word of what he was looking at.
About half-past nine the General relinquished that pretence of reading. He felt the house to be nearly as sad as though someone were lying dead in it, and he could support it no longer. He must find out what was the matter with the child, or at least show her how her old father's heart bled for her. He got up quietly from his big easy-chair, from which he had been used to survey his Nelly's face at the other side of the fireplace for many a happy year. To be sure, it had not been the same since the Dowager had come, and Nelly had gone gadding of evenings. Still, she had always come in to kiss him before she went off, looking radiant and sweet, with the hood of her evening cloak over her bright head and framing the dearest face in the world. She had always clung to him with her soft arms about his neck, and he had not minded her absence since she was enjoying herself as she ought at her age.
He climbed up the stairs of the high house. Nelly had chosen a bedroom right at the top, whence she could look away over the London roofs to the mists that hid the country.
The blinds were up and the cold winter moon lay on the girl's bed. The General came in tip-toe, trying to avoid creaking on the bare boards, which Nelly preferred to carpets. But his precaution was unnecessary. She was lying wide-awake. The darkness of her eyes in her face, unnaturally white from the moonlight, frightened him. He had a memory of Nelly's mother as he had seen her newly-dead, and the memory scared him.
"Is that you, papa?" Nelly asked, half-lifting herself on her pillow. "Come and sit down. I was thinking of dressing myself and coming down to you."
"You mustn't do that if your headache is not better."
"It was nothing at all of a headache," she said with a weary little sigh, "but I must have fallen asleep. If I had not I should have come down to dinner. I only awoke just before the church clock struck nine. Were you very lonely?"
"I am always lonely without you, Nell. You have had nothing to eat, have you? No. Well, perhaps you'd better come down and have a little meal in the study by the fire. Unless you'd prefer a fire up here. The room strikes cold. To be sure, the windows are open. There is snow coming, I think."
"I like the cold. I'm not hungry, but I shall get up presently. I haven't really gone to bed."
She put out a chilly little hand over her father's, and he took it into his. When had they wanted anyone but each other? What new love could ever be as true and tender as his?
"Oh!" cried Nelly, burying her face in her pillow. "I'm a wicked girl to be discontented. I ought to have everything in the world, having you."
"And when did my Nelly become discontented?" he asked, with a passionate tenderness. "What has clouded over my girl, the light of the house? What is it, Nell?"
He had been both father and mother to her. For a second or two she kept her face buried, as if she would still hold her secret from him. His hand brushed the pale ripples of her hair, as another hand had brushed them a short time back. He expected her to answer him, and he was waiting.
"It is Captain Langrishe," she whispered at last. "His boat goes from Tilbury to-morrow morning."
"From Tilbury." The General remembered that Grogan of the Artillery, the club bore, had a daughter and son-in-law sailing from Tilbury next morning, and had suggested his accompanying him to the docks. "Why he should have asked me," the General had said irritably, "when I can barely endure him for half-an-hour, is more than I can imagine!"
"What is wrong between you and Langrishe, Nell?" he asked softly. "I thought he was a good fellow. I know he's a good soldier; and a good soldier must be a good fellow. Has anyone been making mischief?"
He sent a sudden wrathful thought towards the Dowager. Who else was so likely to make mischief? The thought that someone had been making mischief was almost hopeful, since mischief done could be undone if one only set about it rightly.
"No one," Nelly answered mournfully.
The General suddenly stiffened. His one explanation of Langrishe's pride standing in the way was forgotten; it was not reason enough. Was it possible that Langrishe had been playing fast-and-loose with his girl? Was it possible—this was more incredible still—that he did not return her innocent passion? For a few seconds he did not speak. His indignation was ebbing into a dull acquiescence. If Langrishe did not care—why, no one on earth could make him care. No one could blame him even.
"You must give up thinking of him, Nell," he said at last. He could not bring himself to ask her if Langrishe cared. "You must forget him, little girl, and try to be satisfied with your old father till someone more worthy comes along."
"But he is worthy." Nelly spoke with a sudden flash of spirit. "And he cares so much. I always felt he cared. But I never knew how much till we met at his sister's this afternoon and he bade me good-bye."
"Then why is he going?" the General asked, with pardonable amazement.
"Oh, I don't know," Nelly answered irritably. She had never been irritable in all her sunny life. "But although he is gone I am happier than I have been for a long time since I know he cares so much."
"I'll tell you what,"—the General got up quite briskly—"dress yourself, Nell, and come down to the study, and we'll talk things over. You may be sure, little girl, that your old father will leave no stone unturned to secure your happiness. I'll ring for your dinner to be brought up on a tray and we'll have a happy evening together. And you'd better have a fire here, Nell. It's a very pretty room, my dear, with all your pretty fal-lals, but it strikes me as being very chilly."
He went downstairs and rang the bell for Miss Nelly's dinner. The fire had been stoked in his absence, and was now burning gloriously.
He drew Nelly's chair closer to it and a screen around the chair. He put a cushion for her back, and a hassock for her feet. The little acts were each an eloquent expression of his love for her. He was suddenly, irrationally hopeful. He reproached himself because he had done so little. He had thought he was doing a great deal when he, an old man and so high in his profession, had made advances to the young fellow for his girl's sake. To be sure, he had been certain that Langrishe was in love with Nell, else the thing had not been possible. Now that his love was beyond doubt the old idea recurred to him. It must be some chivalrous, overstrained scruple about his poverty which came between poor Nell and her happiness. Standing by the fire, waiting for Nelly, he rubbed his hands together with a return of cheerfulness.
In a few minutes she came gliding in shyly. That confidence had only been possible in the dark. The General felt her embarrassment and busied himself in stirring the fire. Pat came up with the tray—such a dainty tray, loaded with good things. The General called for a glass of wine for Miss Nelly. He waited on her with a tender assiduity and she forced herself to eat, saying to herself with passionate gratitude that she would be a brute if she did not swallow to please him.
The wine brought a colour to her cheeks. She watched her father with shy eyes. What could he do to bring her and her lover together, seeing that it was Captain Langrishe's last night in England and that he would not return for five years? Five years spread out an eternity to Nelly's youthful gaze. She might be dead before five years were over. This afternoon she had felt no great desire to live, but that despair, of course, was wrong. She had not remembered at the moment how dear she and her father were to each other. As long as they were together there must be compensations for anything in life.
She had expected her father to speak, but he did not. While he had been standing by the fire awaiting her coming he had had qualms. Supposing she had made a mistake about the young fellow's feeling for her. Such things happened with girls sometimes. Supposing—no, it was better to keep silence for the present. If things turned out well, it would be time enough to tell Nelly. If things turned out well! What, after all, were five years? To the General, for whom the wheel of the days and the years had been turning giddily fast and ever faster these many years back, five years counted for little. He had a hale, hearty old life. Surely the Lord in His goodness would permit him to look on Nelly's happiness and his grandchildren! It was another thing to think of Nelly's children when the match was not of the Dowager's making.
He inspired Nelly with something of his own hopefulness. She saw that he had some design which she was not to share. Well, she could trust his love to move mountains for her happiness. The evening was far better than she could have hoped for, and she went to bed comforted.
"Early breakfast, Nell," he said as they parted. "I've ordered it for eight o'clock. But I shan't expect to see you unless you feel like it. These cold mornings it's allowable to be a little lazy."
This from the General, who rose at half-past six all the year round and had his cold bath even when he had to break the ice on it. Nelly's laziness, too, was a matter of recent date. She had always loved the winter and had seemed to glow the fresher the colder the weather.
The General thought of himself as an arch-diplomatist, but he was transparent enough to his daughter.
"He doesn't want me at breakfast," she said to herself. "He doesn't want me to ask questions. So I shall save him embarrassment by not appearing."
The next morning there was no General to see the squadron of the old regiment gallop past. No family prayers either. What were things coming to? the servants asked each other. And second breakfast at nine for Miss Nelly!
"Take my word for it," said Bridget to Pat, "the next thing'll be Miss Nelly havin' her breakfast in bed like Lord Dunshanbo's daughters. Five of them there was, Pat, all old maids. And they used to sit round in their beds, every one with a satin quilt, and their hair in curl-papers, and a newspaper spread out to save the quilt."
"'Tis too early and too cowld," said Pat, interrupting this reminiscence, "for the master to be goin' out. And he doesn't like bein' put out of his habits, not by the half of a second. I used to think before I was a soldier that punctuality was the most onnecessary thing on earth, but I've come to like it somehow."
"The same here," said Bridget, "though it wasn't in my blood. I wondher what they'd think of us at home?"
The General was at Fenchurch Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover his presence at the boat.
Now that he was started on the adventure he was nervously anxious lest he should compromise his girl by betraying to Langrishe the errand he was come on, unless, indeed, Langrishe gave him the lead. He was as sensitive as Nelly herself could have been about offering her where she was not desired or was likely to be rejected. But he assured himself that everything would be right. In the sudden surprise of seeing him, Langrishe would say or do something that would give him a lead. He would be able to bring back a message of hope to Nelly. Five years—after all, what were five years? Especially to a girl as young as Nelly. They could wait very well till Langrishe came home again.
At the booking-office he was told that the special train for theSutlejhad just gone. Another train for Tilbury was leaving in five minutes.
"You will get in soon after the special," the booking-clerk assured him. "Plenty of time to see your friends before she sails. Why, she's not due to sail till twelve o'clock. There'll be a deal of luggage to be got on board."
The General unfolded hisStandardin the railway carriage, and turned to the principal page of news. A big headline, followed by a number of smaller ones, caught his eye: "Outrage at Shawur. An English Officer and Five Sepoys Caught in a Trap. Death of Major Sayers. Regiment Sent in Pursuit. Statement in the House."
The General bent his brows over the report. He had known poor Sayers—a most distinguished soldier, but brave to rashness. And the Wazees tribe, treacherous rascals! The General had some experience of them too. Ah, so Mordaunt was sent in pursuit. The tribe had retired after the murder to its fastnesses in the hills. He remembered those fortified towers in the hill valleys. He had had to smoke them out once like rats in a hole. Ah, poor Sayers! The brutes! And Sayers had a young wife!
He lifted his head from the paper, and stared out of the carriage windows, where tiny cottages, with neat white stones for their garden borders, showed that the train was passing through a residential district much affected by retired sailor-men. The mast of a ship seemed to be a favourite ornament, and a little flag was hoisted on many lawns. Flakes of dry snow came in the wind, but, cold as it was, a good many of the old sailors were out pottering about their tiny gardens. Here a glimpse of the river, or a church spire with many graves nestled under it, came to break the monotony of the little houses.
The General looked without seeing. He was thinking of Sayers' young wife—to be sure, she was not so young now: she must be well over thirty—an innocent-faced creature, sitting at the piano in a white gown, singing, while he and poor Sayers paced the garden-walk in the twilight. Poor woman! how was she to bear it? Those knives, too! The General ground his teeth in fury.
Then suddenly another aspect of the matter flashed upon him, so suddenly that he almost leaped in his seat. Why, the —th Madras Light Infantry—he remembered now—it was Langrishe's regiment. How extraordinary that he should not have remembered before! It was the regiment sent in pursuit. Langrishe would fall in for some fighting—he would find it ready-made to his hand. Those little frontier wars were endless things once they started. And what toll they took of precious human lives! In the last one more young fellows of the General's acquaintance had been killed than he liked to remember. Such deaths, too! Even the bravest soldier might well shrink from the fiendish things the Wazees were capable of.
Suddenly the train pulled up abruptly, so abruptly that for a few seconds it quivered as a horse will after being hard-driven. The General went to the window and looked out. The houses had been left behind and around them was a country of grey mud-flats with the river dragging its sluggish length through it like a great serpent. There was a windmill on the horizon, breaking the uniform grey of land and river and sky. The sky was heavy with coming snow.
The guard of the train was standing on the line, beating his two arms against his breast to warm them, and answering stolidly the impatient questions of the passengers.
"Obstruction on the line in front, sir," he said, addressing nobody in particular. "Waggon broke away from the siding and got on to our track. There's a breakdown gang doing its level best to get us clear. How long? Can't say, I'm sure, sir. Matter of half an hour, maybe."
The matter of half an hour became a matter of three-quarters, of an hour, of an hour and a quarter. The train grumbled from end to end. Here and there a particularly indignant passenger got out with the expressed intention of walking to his destination. The officials bore it all patiently. It was no fault of theirs. The breakdown gang, was doing its best. It was a very lucky thing the runaway had been discovered just before the train came round the corner. The train for theSutlejmust have had a narrow shave of meeting it.
The General sat in his compartment, which he had to himself, with his watch in his hand. He was thinking of Sayers and Sayers' young wife. Mordaunt was not married, but he had an old mother at home in England. It was bad enough for the men, the brave fellows. But that women should have to suffer such things through their love was intolerable.
The cold intensified. Philosophical passengers either wrapped themselves in their rugs or got out and walked up and down, stamping their feet, their hands in their coat-pockets. The General sat, quiet as a Fate, staring at his watch. His thoughts were tending towards a certain conclusion.
At first he had been merely impatient for the train to get on. As time passed he became more impatient as it was borne in on him that he might possibly be too late for theSutlej. He might lose the chance of looking in Langrishe's eyes and getting the lead he desired so that he might say the words which would bring happiness to his Nelly. Still the time went on. His moustache became little icicles. If anyone had been looking at him they might have thought that he suggested being frozen himself, so stiff and grey was he. They were within a few miles of Tilbury. It was now half-past eleven. TheSutlejwas to sail at twelve. Was there any chance of his being there in time? The guard had said half an hour! If he had not, the General might have walked with those other impatient passengers.
But if the General was a religious man—nay, rather because he was a religious man—he looked for signs and portents from God for the direction of his everyday life. He believed that God, amid all His whirling world of stars and all His ages, had leisure to attend to every unit of a life upon earth. He believed in special Providences. Everything that was dear to him or near to his heart he commended to God in his prayers. He had prayed for direction and guidance in this matter of his girl and young Langrishe. He had thought to do his best. Well, was not the breakdown of the train a sign that his best was not God's best?
At ten minutes to twelve the track was free, and the train resumed its journey. It was now one chance in a thousand that the General would not be too late. If that chance came, if he saw Langrishe he would take it as a sign that God approved his first intention. If theSutlejhad sailed—well, that, too, was the leading and the light.
As they ran into Tilbury Station a train was standing at the departure platform. The General beckoned to a porter.
"Do you know if theSutlejhas sailed?"
"Yes, sir—sailed at ten minutes to twelve. Might catch her at Southampton, sir, perhaps. There's a good many people as well as you disappointed in this 'ere train. There's another train back in three minutes."
"When is the next train?"
"Three hours' time."
The General went to the door of the carriage and looked out; then retired hastily. He had caught sight of Grogan and Mrs. Grogan and a number of boys and girls of all ages. Not for worlds would he have let Grogan see him. The amazement at seeing him, the questions about his presence there, Grogan's laugh, Grogan's slap on the back, would be more than the General could bear at this moment.
"I shall wait for the next train," he said to the astonished porter. The porter had not thought of Tilbury as a place where the casual visitor desired to wait for three hours.
The General remained in the train till the other had steamed out of the station. When all danger was over he alighted and walked to the hotel of many partings. He ordered his lunch, a chop and a vegetable, biscuits and cheese. While his chop was cooking he would stretch his legs, cramped by that long time in the train.
He walked along the docks, dodging lorries and waggons, getting out at the side of a basin, with a clear walk along its edge. It was empty—theSutlejhad left it only three-quarters of an hour ago. He paced up and down by the grey water, lost in thought.
TheSutlejhad sailed, ten minutes before the time anticipated. God had given him the sign. He had turned him from his presumptuous attempt to be Providence to his Nelly. The General never had been, never could be, passive. He was made for the activities of life. Yet his religious ideal was passivity—to be in the hands of God expecting, accepting, His Will for all things. It was an ideal he had never attained to, and it was, perhaps, therefore the dearer.
He was oblivious of the cold, of the creeping water, of the thickening flakes in the air which nearly blotted out the silent ship the other side of the basin. He saw nothing but the pointing Finger, the Finger that pointed away from the course he had marked out for himself. He felt uplifted, glad, as one who has escaped a great peril. Was his Nelly to suffer the torture of an engagement to a man who would presently be every hour in danger of a horrible death? Was she, poor child, to suffer like Mrs. Sayers? like poor old Mrs. Mordaunt? No. She must be saved from the possibility of that.
He would say nothing. He would have to endure the looks she would send him from under her white eyelids, the looks of wistful entreaty. After all, he had notsaidhe was going to do anything. He had implied it, to be sure, but he had not committed himself to anything very definite. Perhaps Nelly would not discover, for a time at least, the dangerous service Langrishe had gone on. She was no more fond of the newspapers than any other young girl. For the moment he was grateful to the Dowager that she claimed so much of Nelly's time.
He began to look forward with a fearful anticipation to Nelly's marriage to her cousin. Something must be settled at once, before she could begin to grieve over Langrishe. He would be alone, of course, but Nelly would be in harbour. He did so much justice to Robin that he believed her happiness would be safe with him. He felt as if he must go home and put matters in train at once. He was impatient till Nelly was safe. It did not occur to him that he was, perhaps, once more wresting the conduct of his daughter's happiness from the Hand in Whose guidance he humbly trusted.
He awoke with a start to the fact that he had been more than half an hour pacing along by the water's edge. He hurried back to the hotel. Fortunately, his chop was not put on the grill till he returned, and it was served to him piping hot, with tomatoes and a bottle of Burton. Rather to his amazement, he enjoyed it thoroughly, but when he had finished it he had still more than an hour to wait.
He drove across country to another station, and arrived home early in the afternoon. During the return journey his mind was quite calm and unperturbed. He had had the guidance he needed, and now he had only to let things be—as though it were in his character to let things be!
He dreaded meeting Nelly's eyes and welcomed the Dowager's presence with effusion. He suggested to the lady that she should dine, and afterwards they would visit a theatre—A Soldier's Loveat the Adelphi was well worth seeing, he believed. Lady Drummond accepted, flattered by this unwonted friendliness. He would hardly let her out of his sight all that afternoon. She was his safeguard against Nelly's wondering, reproachful eyes.
He had to endure those eyes all the next day. Then—the eyes retired in on themselves, became introspective. It was hardly easier for the General, that look of a suffering woman in his Nelly's eyes.
To be sure, poor Nelly had known of that journey to Tilbury just as well as if she had accompanied him. The only thing she did not know was that he had failed to see Captain Langrishe. And his silence—the looks of tender pity he sent her when he thought he was unobserved, what could they mean but that his mediation had been in vain? For some strange, cruel reason, although he loved her and he must know he was breaking her heart, her lover would have none of her. Even the knowledge that he loved her ceased to be an anodyne in those days.
Everyone was so good to her. She seemed to have found a way to the Dowager's arid heart, as her own son had not. The Dowager seemed dimly aware that Nelly was suffering in some way, and was tender to her. She came to the General with a proposal. Why should they not all go abroad together and escape the east winds of spring? The General leaped at it. Once get Nelly abroad and she would know nothing of what was happening on the Indian frontier. He, and Nelly and the Dowager. He had not imagined the Dowager in such a party—yet, he shrank from the prolongedtête-à-têtewith Nell which the trip would have been without the Dowager's presence. Robin would join them at Easter. They could all travel home together.
There was a time of bustle when Nelly and the Dowager were getting their travelling outfits. A spark of excitement, of anticipation, lit up Nelly's sad eyes. The General could have hugged the Dowager.
"Your dear father," the Dowager said to Nelly one day, "how calm he grows as he turns round to old age! I see in him more and more the brother my dear Gerald looked up to and reverenced."
The peacefulness, the good understanding, had their effect, too, on Nelly. It was good that those she loved should dwell together in amity. She was in that state that she could not have endured sharpness or rancour.
Only Pat shook his head disapprovingly.
"If he goes on like this," he said, "he'll be goin' to Heaven before his time. I'd a deal sooner hear him grumblin' about her Ladyship as he used to do. It 'ud be more natural-like, so it would. Why would we be callin' him 'Old Blood and Thunder' if 'twas to be like an image he was? Och, the ould times were ever the best!"
"He'll come to himself yet," said Bridget more hopefully.
The room was a long bare one, with three deep windows. They were all open so that the fog and the noises of the street came in freely. It had for furniture a long office table, an American desk, several cupboards—the door of one of these last stood open, revealing lettered pigeon-holes inside. Everywhere there were files, letter-baskets, all manner of receptacles for papers. There were a number of hard, painted chairs. An American clock ticked on the mantel-shelf, a fire burned in the grate behind a high wire screen. The unshaded gas-lights gave the room a dreary aspect it need not have had otherwise.
The only occupant of the room was Mary Gray, who sat at a small table working a typewriter. She had pulled a gas-jet down low over her head, and the light of it was on her hair, bringing out bronze lights in it, on her neck, showing its whiteness and roundness. The machine clicked away busily. Sheet after sheet was pulled from it and dropped into a basket. The basket was half-filled with the pile of papers that had fallen into it.
Suddenly there came a little tap at the door. Mary raised her head and looked towards it expectantly as she said, "Come in."
Someone came in, someone whom she had expected to see, although she had said to herself that she supposed the caretaker of the building had grown tired of waiting, and was coming to remind her that the church clock had just struck seven.
"Ah, Sir Robin," she said, turning about to shake hands with him. "Who would have thought of seeing you? I am just going home."
"As I came past this way I looked up and saw your light through the fog. I thought you would be going home, and that you would let me escort you to your own door. There is a bit of a fog really."
"I am glad you did not come out of your way. Thank you. I shall be ready in a few minutes. You don't mind waiting?"
"Not at all. May I smoke?"
"Do. It will be pleasanter than the smell of the fog."
"Ah! I hadn't noticed the smell. I have a delusion, or do I really smell—violets?"
"There are some violets by your elbow. I was wearing them, but they drooped, so I put them into water to revive them."
She turned back again to her work, and the clicking of the machine began anew. He leant to inhale the smell of the violets. Then, with a glance at her bent head, he drew one from the bunch, and, taking a pocket-book out of his coat-pocket, he opened it, and laid the violet between two of its pages.
While he waited he looked about him. The ugliness of the room did not affect him. The flaring gas, the business-like furniture, the unhomely aspect of the place, did not depress him. On the contrary, in his eyes it was pleasant. He always came to it with a sensation of happiness, which was not lessened because he felt half-guilty about it. To him the room was the room which for certain hours of every day contained Mary Gray. What did it matter if the case was unlovely since it held her?
Presently the clicking of the machine ceased, and she looked up at him with a smile.
"You are very good to wait for me," she said.
"Am I?" he answered, smiling back at her. "There is not very much to do to-day. The House is not sitting, and my constituency has been less exacting than usual."
She put the cover on her machine, locked up her desk, and then retired into a corner, where she changed her shoes, putting her slippers away tidily in a cupboard. She put on her hat, setting it straight before a little glass that hung in one corner. She got into her little blue jacket, with its neat collar and cuffs of astrachan. Then she came to him, drawing on her gloves.
"I am quite ready now," she said.
They lowered the gas, and went down the stone steps side by side. At the foot of the stairs Mary stopped to call into the depths of the back premises that she was going home, and a woman's voice bade her good-night.
It was cold in the street, and there was a light brown fog through which the street lamps shone yellowly.
The omnibuses crept by quietly, in a long string, making a muffled sound in the fog. As they went towards the nearest station a wind suddenly blew in their faces.
"It is the west wind," she said. "And it breathes of the spring."
"There will be no fog to-night," he answered. "See, it is lifting. The west wind will blow it away."
"It comes from fields and woods and mountains and the sea," she said dreamily.
The fog was indeed disappearing. The gas-jets shone more clearly; the 'buses broke into a decorous trot. The long line of lights came out suddenly, crossing each other like a string of many-coloured gems.
Outside the Tube station they paused as though the same thought had struck both of them.
"It is like the washing of the week before last," Mary said, as the indescribable odour floated out to them.
"Why not take a 'bus?" said he. "The air grows more delicious."
"Why not, indeed?" she answered. "Except that I shall be so late getting home. And it will keep you late for your dinner."
"So it will," he said. "To say nothing of your dinner. I know you had only sandwiches and tea for lunch. You have told me that when you go home you make yourself a chafing-dish supper. You must need a meal at this moment. Supposing—Miss Gray, will you do me the honour of dining with me?"
"Will you let me pay for my dinner? I am a working-woman, and expect to be treated like a man."
"If you insist. But I hope you will not insist."
She looked at him for a moment hesitatingly. There was no prudery about Mary Gray. She had become a woman of the world, and she had had no reason to distrust thecamaraderieof men or to think it less than honest.
"Very well, then," she said, "if you will let me pay for your lunch another time."
"Why, so you shall," he answered. For a usually grave young man he laughed with an uncommon joyousness. "You shall give me one day a French lunch with a bottle of wine thrown in at one-and-sixpence. Mind, I must have the wine."
"You shall have the wine. But it isn't good form to talk about the price of a lunch you are invited to."
Laughing light-heartedly, they plunged into a labyrinth of dark streets. The west wind had brought a gentle rain with it now. It was benignant upon their faces, with a suggestion of grasses and spring flowers pushing their heads above the earth. They passed by the Soho restaurants, crowded to the doors. They found one at last in a more pretentious street.
Over the dinner they laughed and talked. There was something intoxicating to Robin Drummond's somewhat phlegmatic nature in their being together after this friendly fashion.
"You have a crease in your forehead, just above your nose," he said, while they waited for their salmon, the waiter having removed the plates from which they had eaten theirbisque. "Have the Working Women been more unsatisfactory than usual to-day?"
"I was not thinking of the Working Women," she answered. "It is family cares that are on my mind. Supposing you had seven young brothers and sisters whom you wanted to help to place out in the world——"
"Heaven forbid! It's no wonder you look worried. What do you want to do for them, Miss Gray?"
"There's Jim. He's seventeen years old. I think he'd make a very good bank-clerk, but at present he wants to go to sea. There isn't the remotest chance of his being able to go to sea. The question is whether he can get a nomination to a bank. It will be quite a step in the social scale if we can manage it for Jim."
She looked at Drummond with her frank, direct gaze, and he blushed awkwardly.
"I don't know anything at all about your people, or anything of that sort, Miss Gray, but if I could help——"
"I don't think you could help." Mary's big mysterious eyes under their dark lashes, under their beautiful brows, looked at him reflectively. "You see, you don't know anything about us. I am the eldest of a large family. The others are my stepbrothers and sisters. I love them dearly, and I love my stepmother, too. But not like my father—oh, not at all like my father. I would never have left him only he sent me away. Lady Agatha was very good to me. She paid me a disproportionate salary. And besides—after I had been away from them for a time they could really do very well without me. Cis and Minnie grew up so fast. To be sure, none of them make up to father for me. But he was really anxious that I should go. He thought I would be cramped at home, after——" She paused, and then went on: "He would never think of himself when it was a question of me."
What she was saying did not greatly enlighten him. But, without a doubt, something would come out of the desultory talk by-and-by.
As he watched her in the light of the electric candle-lamps on the table, which, sending their shaded light upwards reflected from the white cloth, made her face luminous in the shadow of her cloudy hair, he was struck again by a baffling resemblance to someone he had known. Now and again during the months since they had known each other her face had seemed familiar; then the likeness had disappeared; he had forgotten to be curious about it. At this moment the suggestion was very strong.
They had the top of the 'bus to themselves as they went on westward. At this hour the traffic was eastward, and the mist of rain saved them from fellow-travellers. They were as much alone as though they were in a desert, up there in the darkness at the back of the bus, with the long line of blurred jewels that were the street lamps stretching away before them.
They passed close to the trees overhanging a square, and the branches brushed them.
"The sap is stirring in the trees to-night," she said. "Can't you smell the sap and the earth?"
"I associate you with the country and green things," he answered irrelevantly. "Can you tell me, Miss Gray, how it is that I who have always seen you in London yet always think of you in fields and woods?"
She laughed with a fresh sound of mirth.
"We met long ago, Sir Robin," she said. "I have always been wondering how long it would be before you found out."
"Where?"
"Think!"
A sudden light broke over him.
"You were the little girl who came with old Lady Anne Hamilton to the Court. It is nine years ago. I never knew your name. Lady Anne died one Long Vacation when I was abroad. I did not hear of it for a long time afterwards. I asked my mother once if she knew what had become of you, but she did not. Why, to be sure, you are that little girl."
"Lady Anne was very good to me. She gave me an education. Only for her the thing I am would not be possible. And I mean to be more than that. Do you know that I am writing a book?"
"A novel? Poems?"
"That is what my father's daughter ought to be doing. No—it is a book on the Economic Conditions of Women's Work."
"It is sure to be good,citoyenne."
"I am a revolutionary," she said seriously. "I have learnt so much since I have been at this work. I have things to tell. Oh, you will see."
"I remember Lady Anne as the staunchest of Conservatives."
"Yes, yet she was tolerant of other opinions in her friends. She was very good to me, dear old Lady Anne."
"To think I should not have remembered!"
"I knew you all the time. To be sure, there was your name. I don't think you ever knew my name. You called me Mary all the afternoon. Do you remember the puppy you sent me—the Clumber spaniel? He died in distemper. He had a happy little life. I wept bitter tears over him."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"I thought I'd leave you to find out."
"I am a stupid fellow." He leant towards her, and inhaled the scent of her violets.
"I don't think I should have guessed it now," he said, "only for the spring. To think you are Mary!" He lingered over the name.
"I am sorry about the Clumber. You shall have another when you ask for it."
It was a long drive westward. They got down at Kensington Church, and went up the hill. Close by the Carmelites they turned into a little alley. The lit doorway of a high building of flats faced them.
"Now, you must come no farther," she said, turning to him and holding out her hand.
"Let me see you to your door," he pleaded.
"If you will, but it is a climb for nothing."
"What a barrack you live in!" he said, as they went up the stone steps.
"It was built for working men originally, but perhaps there is none hereabouts. It is now chiefly occupied by working women. They are extremely pleasant and friendly. To be sure, they are West-End working women. Now, Sir Robin, I must bid you good-bye."
They were at the very top of the house. The staircase window was wide open, and the sweet smell of wet earth came in. She had put the latch-key in the door and opened it—she had turned on the electric light. Now, as she held out her hand to him in farewell, he caught sight of the pleasant little room beyond. He had the strongest wish to cross the threshold on which she was standing; but, of course, it was impossible.
"When my cousin comes back from abroad," he said, "I want you to know each other, Miss Gray. Perhaps you will ask us to tea here."
"I shall be delighted," she said frankly.
"You like your quarters?"
He was oddly reluctant to go.
"Very much indeed."
"You are near Heaven."
"I hear the singing at the Carmelites. I can see the tops of the trees in Kensington Gardens. To be sure, I ought to live nearer my work. But these things counterbalance the distance. By the way, do you know that Mrs. Morres is in town?"
"I had not heard."
"She has come up for a week's shopping."
"Ah! I must call on her. I like her douches of cold water on all our schemes."
"So do I."
He looked at her with a dawning intention in his eyes. Before he could speak the words that were on his lips the opposite door opened, and a young woman, wearing an artist's blouse, with close-cropped dark hair and a frank boyish face, came out.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Gray, do you happen to have any methylated spirit?"
"Good-night, Miss Gray."
He lifted his hat and went down the stairs. On the next landing he paused and listened with a smile to the conversation overhead. It appeared that Mary had only enough methylated spirit for a single occasion.
"Then you must come to breakfast with me in the morning," said the other girl. "Can you oblige me with a few slices of bacon?"
It was the true communistic life.
He was smiling to himself still as he walked up the hill homewards. "Winter is over and past, and the spring is come," he murmured to himself. And to think that a few hours ago the fog was creeping over the City!
Mrs. Morres was looking benignantly, for her, at Sir Robin Drummond.
"Well, I must say I'm pleased to see you," she said. "It's very handsome of you, too, to give up the affairs of the nation for an old woman like me. How do you suppose things are getting on without you?"
"The House is not sitting this afternoon. You know it rises for the Easter vacation to-morrow."
"On Thursday I go down to Hazels. I wanted that bad person, Mary Gray, to come with me. She says she has to work at her book. Did you ever hear such stuff and nonsense? As though the world can't get on without one young woman's book. I told her she could do it at Hazels. She says she couldn't—that she'll have to be out all day long. London will not tempt her out, she says. Is she to go bending her back and dimming her eyes while the lambs are at play in the fields and the primroses thick in the woods?"
"She's an obstinate person, Mrs. Morres. When she has made up her mind to do a thing——"
"Ah! you know her pretty well."
"We first met about nine years ago."
"Dear me! I had no idea that you were such old friends. I thought you met first in this house."
"Lady Anne Hamilton, the old lady who adopted Miss Gray, was my mother's friend."
He said nothing about the fact that twelve hours ago he had not known Mary Gray for the child he had played with for one afternoon, nor of the long gap between that occasion and their next meeting. Not from any disingenuousness; but he had a feeling that he liked to keep that meeting of long ago to himself.
"Dear me, to be sure you would be interested in Mary. You would know a good deal about her. Nine years—it is a long time."
If he had been the most consummate plotter he could not better have paved the way for the suggestion he was about to make.
"Put off your return to Hazels till Saturday morning. I want to take you and Miss Gray into the country for a day on Thursday."
"Indeed, young man! And wait for the Saturday crowd of holiday-makers! A nice figure I should be struggling among them."
"I will be at Victoria to see you off."
"Oh, you needn't do that." Mrs. Morres turned about with the inconsequence of her sex. "I've brought one of the maids up with me. She will take care of me better than most men. She is alarming, this good Susan, to the people who don't know her. But I thought you were going abroad?"
"So I am. Saturday morning will do me very well."
"How did you know I was in town? No one is supposed to. All the blinds are down in front and will be till her Ladyship returns."
"Miss Gray told me. I saw her yesterday."
She looked at him sharply. His honest, plain face reassured her. A friendship of nine years, too. What trouble could there possibly arise after a friendship of nine years? Mary must know that he was all but engaged to his cousin.
"Does she approve of the country trip?"
"I have not asked her. I left that to you to do. She has been shut up in London all the winter. She needs a breath of country air."
"So she does. She shows the London winter, though you may not see it. Very well, you shall take us both into the country on Thursday. Mary will not dream of refusing me."
"That is it. She means to spend those six days between Thursday and Wednesday toiling at her book. I have heard her say that she will spend Thursday at the British Museum."
"Stuff and nonsense, she shan't! The world will do just as well without the book. She must come to Hazels on Saturday. You will help me to persuade her?"
"I will do my best. How did you leave Hazels?"
"Lovely. For the rest, a wilderness of despairing dogs. They will forgive me if I bring back Mary. By the way, what have you got for me to do on Friday? If you will keep me in town when all the shops are shut! Not that it matters. I've finished all my shopping. But am I to spend my Good Friday here, in this room? London streets are no place for a poor woman on Good Friday."
"Will you go to church? There is a service at a church near here, with Bach's Passion music."
"I should like to, of all things. Afterwards, perhaps, Mary would give us tea at her eyrie. You and she must dine with me. She is coming this evening to dinner. Come back to dinner at half-past seven and help me to persuade her. I can only give you a chop. Some mysterious person in the lower region cooks for me. She is the plainest of the plain."
"It will be a banquet, with you."
Sir Robin was not a young man who paid compliments easily. When he did pay one it had always an air of sincerity. Mrs. Morres looked pleased. She was very fond of Robin Drummond.
When he and Mary met at the door a few hours later he made a jest about their dining together again so soon, and they laughed about it—to be sure, that dinner at the restaurant was a secret, something that did not belong to the conventional life. There was the air of a little understanding between them when they presented themselves to Mrs. Morres in the book-room which she used for all purposes of a sitting-room during her flying visit to town. It was a pleasant room, with book-cases all round it filled with green glass in a lattice of brass-work. The books were hidden by the glass, but it reflected every movement of a bird or a twig or a cloud outside like green waters. The ceiling was domed like a sky and painted in sunny Italian scenery. It was not dull in the book-room on the dullest day.
"Did you come together?" Mrs. Morres asked curiously.
"I swear we did not," Sir Robin replied, with mock intensity. "I came from the east, Miss Gray from the west. We met on your doorstep."
"You looked as if you were enjoying a joke when you came in."
"There was time for one between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the door."
"Ah, you see, the people downstairs are very old."
Mary allowed herself to be persuaded to the country expedition next day. The spring had been calling to her, calling to her to come out of London to the fields. More, she consented to go to Hazels on the Saturday. The spring had disturbed her with a delicious disturbance. It was no use trying to be dry-as-dust since the spring had got into her blood. The book must wait till she came back.
On Thursday the exodus from town had not yet begun. They left soon after breakfast. As Mary hurried from her Kensington flat to Paddington Station she met the church-goers with their prayer-books in their hands. It was Holy Thursday, to be sure—a day for solemn thought and thanksgiving. She hoped hers would not be less acceptable because it was made in the quietness of the fields.
It was an exquisite day of April—true Holy Week weather, with white clouds, like lambs straying in the blue pastures of the sky, shepherded by the south-west wind. The almond trees were in bloom. They had begun to drop their blossoms on the pavements, making a dust of roses in London streets. As they went down from Paddington the river-side orchards and gardens were starred with the blossom of pear and plum. Everywhere the birds were singing jocundly. The promise of spring a few days earlier had been nobly fulfilled.
The sun shone powerfully as they left the country station and went down a road set with bare hedges on either side. A week ago there had been frost. Now there was a grateful odour from the millions and millions of little spear-heads of grass that were pushing above the ground. On the banks by the side of the road there were primroses and violets, while there was yet a drift of last week's snow in the sheltered copses.
They found an inn by the side of the road. To the back of it lay a belt of woods. In front was a great stretch of cornfield and pasturage. In the distance a church-spire and yet other woods.
There was no village in sight. The village was, as a matter of fact, lying about its green and velvety common just a little way down the road. The place was full of the singing of the birds, and of another sound as sweet, the rushing of waters. A little river ran down from the higher country and passed through the inn-garden, turning a water-wheel as it went. The picture on the old sign was of a water-wheel. The inn was called the Water-Wheel.
"What a name to think upon!" said Mary, with a sigh, "in a torrid London August! it sounds full of refreshment."
"Its patrons would no doubt prefer the Beer-Keg," said Mrs. Morres, and was reproached for being cynical on such a day.
While they waited for a meal they explored the delightful inn-garden. It was not Sir Robin's first visit, and he was able to point out to them the lions of the place. There was the landlord's aviary of canary-birds, so hardy that they lived in the open air all the year round. There were the ferrets in a cage. Not far off, in a proximity which must have profoundly interested the ferrets, there was an enclosure of white rabbits. There was a wild duck which had been picked up injured in the leg one cold winter, and had become tame and followed them about now from place to place. There were a peacock and a peahen, a sty full of tiny, squeaking black piglets, hives of bees, all manner of pleasant country things. A lordly St. Bernard, with deep eyes of affection, followed Sir Robin as a well-remembered friend.
"Out in the woods," Sir Robin said, "there is a pond which later will be covered with water-lilies. The nightingales will have begun now. The wood is a grove of them. The landlord owned up handsomely when I came here first that 'they dratted things kept one awake at night.' I was only sorry they did not keep me. But after the first I slept too soundly."
"What did you find to do?" Mrs. Morres asked.
"Fish. There are plenty of trout in the upper reaches of the river."
They found their lunch of cold roast beef and salad, rhubarb tart and cream, delicious. The landlord had some good old claret in his cellar and produced it as though Sir Robin were an honoured guest. They sat to the meal by an open window. There were wallflowers under the window. In a bowl on the table were hyacinths and sweet-smelling narcissi.
After the meal Mrs. Morres was tired. "Let me rest," she said, "till tea-time. What did you say was the train? Five-thirty? Will you order tea for half-past four? It is half-past two now. Go and explore the woods. I believe I shall go asleep if I'm allowed. The buzzing of the bees out there is a drowsy sound."
Mary voted for walking up-stream, and confessed to a passion for tracking rivers to their sources. They stepped out briskly. She was wearing a long cloak of grey-blue cloth, which became her. Presently she took it off and carried it on her arm. Her frock beneath repeated the colour of the cloak. It had a soft fichu about the neck of yellowed muslin, with a pattern of little roses. He looked at her with admiration. He knew as little about clothes as most men, and, like most men, he loved blue. She did well to wear blue on such a day. The grey of her eyes took on the blue of her garments, a blue slightly silvered, like the blue of the April sky.
As the ground ascended, the stream brawled and leaped over little boulders green with the water-stain and lichens. There were quiet pools beside the boulders. As they stood by one they saw the fin of a trout in the obscurity.
They met no one. Presently they were higher than the woods and out on a green hillside. When they first appeared the place was alive with rabbits, who hurried to their burrows with a flash of white scuts.
"If we sit down on the hillside we can see the valley," Sir Robin said. "We can look down into the valley at our leisure. It is filled with a golden haze. This good sun is drawing out the winter damps. You shall have my coat to sit on. Wasn't I far-seeing to bring it?"
He spread the coat, which he had been carrying on his arm, for Mary, and she sat down on the very edge of the incline. The St. Bernard laid his silver and russet head on her skirt. They had lost sight of the river now. It had retired into the woods. When they sat down Sir Robin consulted his watch, and found that they might stay for nearly an hour. There was a bruised sweetness in the atmosphere about them, which they discovered presently to be wild thyme. They were sitting on a bed of it. He thought of it afterwards as one of the sweetnesses that must be always associated with Mary Gray, like the smell of violets. The full golden sun poured on them, warming them to the heart. The bees buzzed about the wild thyme and the golden heads of gorse. Little blue moths fluttered on the hillside. The rabbits, lower down the hill, came out of their burrows again and gambolled in the sunshine.
"How sweet it all is!" Mary said impulsively. "I shall always remember this day."
"And I."
He plucked idly at the wild thyme and the little golden vetches among the coarse grass of the hillside. A fold of the blue dress lay beside him. He touched it inadvertently, and the colour came to his cheek: unobserved, because he had his hat pulled down over his eyes, and Mary was sketching for him in detail the plan of her book. It interested him because it was hers. Her voice sounded like poetry. He had not wanted poetry. Blue-books and statistics had satisfied him very well, hitherto. But, to be sure, he had read poetry in his Oxford days. Lines and tags of it came into his mind dreamily as he listened to her voice. He did not touch that fold of her gown again. If he was sure—but he was not quite sure. And there was Nelly. He supposed Nelly cared for him if she was willing to marry him. If Nelly cared—why, then, he had no right to think of other possibilities.
Something had gone out of the glory and enchantment of the day as they went back down the hillside. Those lambs of clouds had suddenly banked themselves up into grey fleeces which covered the sun. The wind blew a little cold.
"It is the capriciousness of April," said Mary, unconscious of any change in the mental atmosphere.
He stopped on the downhill path, took her cloak from her arm, and with kind carefulness laid it about her shoulders. As he arranged it he touched one of the soft curls that lay on her white neck, and again a thrill passed through him. He began to wish that he had not planned this country expedition, after all. He ought really to have started this morning for the Continent. Going on Saturday, he would have very little time to stay.
On the homeward way Mrs. Morres reproached him with his dulness. What had come to him?
He hesitated, glancing at Mary in her corner. Mary had enjoyed her day thoroughly, and was wearing an air of great content. She was carrying a bunch of the wild thyme. She had taken off her hat and her cloudy hair seemed blown about her head like an aureole. She had a delicate, wild, elusive air. He withdrew his glance abruptly.
"It is a guilty conscience," he said. "I ought not to come back and dine with you to-night. I ought to put you into a cab and myself into another, go home for my bag and take the night-express to Paris. The House only rises for ten days and I have to be in my place on the opening night."
Mary looked up at him with a friendly air of being disappointed. She was engaged in putting the wild thyme into a bunch, stalk by stalk. Mrs. Morres began to protest—
"Well, of all the deceitful persons! After luring me to spend a Good Friday in town. To be sure, I shall have Mary. Will you come to the Good Friday service at St. Hugh's with me, Mary?"
"I should love to come."
"Very well, then. Have your bag packed and come back with me to sleep. We shall get off the earlier on Saturday morning. So we shan't miss you at all, Sir Robin."
He looked at her with great contrition.
"My mother—" he began.
"To be sure, your mother has first claim. To say nothing of another."
He coloured. Mary was looking at him with kind interest. Mrs. Morres sent him a quick glance—then looked away again.
"To be sure, you must go, Sir Robin," she said, in a serious voice. "I was only jesting. Ah! here we are! So it is good-bye."
"Au revoir," he corrected.
"Well, au revoir. I hope you'll have a very happy time at Lugano. But you are sure to."
A moment later they had gone off in their cab, and he was feeling the blank of their absence.