WAS one not, when one could make speeches like that, to be listened to as Tony had listened to him—was one not, implicitly, an accepted lover? They had hurt and misunderstood each other and their talk had left a strain; yet such hurts, in natures as intimately united as his and Tony’s, only brought one the nearer. After all, in spite of his essential failure with her, he had shown her, in a clear light, the shapes of her half-seen fears. That was all to the good. She must now, for the first time, accept such fears fully; and might she not, as a result, find herself the readier to live with them? And though she had not seen his truth, he had, through his very unkindness, what she had felt to be his gibes and taunts, made her see her own; and Tony’s truth was, simply, that she could never give him up. So he had computed and analyzed during the evening, while Tony had again sung to them and while Miss Latimer sat, her head bent beneath a lamp, and put fine darns into anembroidered tea-cloth. And what most came to him next morning, with the sense of shock, was an awareness of hidden things; of hours in which he had no part, when Tony said to him, “I talked to Cicely last night.”
They were, as usual, in the drawing-room, after breakfast, and Antonia had seated herself on the low cane settee before the fire, for the grey day was chilly and she had, to an unbecoming extent, the look of being cold. When Tony looked least beautiful, she looked most childlike, and it was for her childlike self that he felt, always, his deepest tenderness aroused. And he was aware now, as he meditated her announcement, of the curious check it gave to his tenderness. “Did you?” he said. His tone was dry. He was not glad to hear that Miss Latimer was in their counsels; but it was a more subtle disquiet than that that took his thoughts from Tony’s dear pouting lips and tightened eyelids. Miss Latimer had all sorts of chances that he didn’t have. His love was like a steady vase into which Tony’s fluidity inevitably poured and shaped itself when he was with her. Butwhen he was not there, Miss Latimer had spells that dissolved her again into wistful, wandering water.
“I didn’t tell her, of course, that I was in love with you and was wondering whether I might marry you,” Antonia went on, “though I think she must know it. I said nothing about myself, really. What we talked of was immortality. I asked her what she believed.”
He kept his eyes upon her, though she did not meet them, standing before her, his cigarette between his teeth. And she felt his displeasure in his silence.
“She doesn’t think as you do,” Antonia went on, in a carefully steady voice. “I mean, her belief is much more definite than yours; much deeper; for she’s always believed, and you, I think, from what you told me, haven’t;—and, oh, passionate. I can’t express to you how I felt that. A white flame of certitude.”
“Ah,” Bevis murmured. He knocked the ash from his cigarette and examined the tip. “No; I’ve no white flames about me.”
She did not pause for his irony. “And we spoke of Malcolm. We never have spoken of him before. I asked her if she expected to see him again, as sheknew him here; unchanged. And she does. No; expect is not the right word. She is sure of it. And she told me something else. Malcolm believed like that. He and she had talked about it; twice. Once when he was hardly more than a boy. And once before he went to France, on the last night he spent here, with her and his mother. He was sure, too. He believed that he was to see me, and her, again. Cicely cried and cried in telling me. I never saw her cry before.”
“Did Malcolm ever talk to you about it?” Bevis asked her after a moment. If he had computed and analyzed new hopes last night, how much more, this morning, he found himself analyzing and computing new difficulties. He had more than Tony’s fluidity to deal with now. Like a tragic, potent moon, Miss Latimer drew her tides away from the rest and safety of the shores he stretched for them.
“No,” she answered, still in the careful, steady voice. “Never like that. Though I remember, in looking back, things he said that meant it.”
He recognized then, and only then, when she answered with such unsuspecting candour, the treacheroussuggestion that had underlain his query. Could he really have wanted to hint that Malcolm’s deepest confidence had been given to his cousin and not to her? Could he really have hoped that a touch of spiritual jealousy might help him? How complete her trust in her husband, and how justified, was further revealed to him, for his discomfiture, as she went on: “It was of me they talked that last night; of our love for each other. He wanted to thank her, again, for having helped him to win me.”
They were silent for a little after that; he cast down upon the sofa beside the fire and Antonia on her settee, her hands holding it on either side, her eyes fixed before her, a new hardness in their gaze. She was, this morning, neither the frightened child nor the helpless lover. She had withdrawn from him, and whether in coldness or control he could not tell. But it was not with her own strength she was armed. She had withdrawn in order to think, without his help, and with the help of Miss Latimer.
“Well, what does it all come to for you, now?” he asked, and he heard the coldness in his voice, a coldnessnot for her, but for that new opponent he had now to deal with.
“It makes it all more terrible, doesn’t it?” she said, sitting there and not looking at him.
“You mean her belief has so much more weight with you than mine?”
“Does it contradict yours?”
“You know it does; or why should things be more difficult—terrible you call them—for you this morning? You say she is more definite than I am. I think definiteness in such matters pure illusion, and I only ask you to realize that it’s easy to a simple nature like Miss Latimer’s. She is unaware of the complexity of the problem.”
“You think that Malcolm, too, was so simple?”
“I do. Not so simple as Miss Latimer; but simpler than you, and you know it; and far simpler than I am; and you know that, too, my dear.”
She sought no dispute. Almost with a hard patience she went on. “Wasn’t their definiteness intuition rather than illusion? Isn’t intuition easier for the simple than for the complex?”
“Intuition isn’t definiteness; that’s just what it isn’t. As for it’s being easier; everything is easier, of course, to simple people.” She, like himself, and she had admitted it, was complex; yet his terrible disadvantage with her was that, while too clever to be satisfied by anything she did not understand, she was too ignorant, really, to understand the cogency of what he might have found to say. Miss Latimer’s simplicities would have more weight with her.
“Something must be definite,” she said. “Immortality means nothing unless it can in some way be defined. It must mean a person, and a person means memory, feeling, will. So, if Malcolm is immortal, he exists now, as he existed here; unchanged; loving me, as he told Cicely he should always love me; and waiting for me, as he told her he would wait.” She had come back to it and Miss Latimer had fixed her in it.
“Perhaps he’s fallen in love with some one else,” Bevis suggested. “You’ve changed to that extent, after all. And you are not longing for him. Quite the contrary.”
Somehow he could not control these exhibitions of his exasperation, nor could he unsay them, ashamed of them as he immediately was.
Her dark gaze rested on him at last, unresentful still, but with, at last, an almost recognized hostility. He was ashamed, yet more exasperated than ever as he saw it.
“It’s almost as if you tried to insult me with my infidelity,” she murmured. “It’s as if, already, you had no respect for me because you know I am unfaithful. Take care, Bevis, for, after all, I may get over you.”
“And I may get over you,” he said, looking not at her, but at the fire and slightly wagging his remaining foot, crossed over the artificial knee.
She was very silent at that, and, shame deepening and anger dropping (it wasn’t anger against her; she must know that) he glanced up at her and found her gaze still on him.
“My dear,” he muttered, smiling wryly, “you stick your needles too deeply into my heart. What’s sport to you is death to me.—No; I don’t meanthat.—All I really mean is that we mustn’t be like children in a nursery slapping at each other. You’re as unlikely to get over me as I am to get over you, and I ask you, in deep seriousness, to accept that fact with all its implications. There it is and what are you going to do with it and with me?”
She had now risen from her seat and walked away from him, vaguely, and she went toward the third window and stood looking out.
She stood there a long time, without moving, and, remembering what she had said to him of it the other day, and of her fear, a discomfort—yet, comparatively, it was a comfort to feel it after their personal dispute—stirred him, so that, rising, with a sigh, he followed her, and, as he had done the other day, looked out over her shoulder at the cedar, the fountain, and the white fritillaries in their narrow beds. He saw from her fixed face that she had forgotten her fear of the harmless scene. Her gaze, with its new, cold grief, was straight before her.
“Tony; dear Tony,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She did not move or look at him.
“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s leave this place. It’s bad for us both. Sell it. Give it to Miss Latimer. Chuck it all, Tony, and start a new life with me. Chuck the whole ghoulish business of Malcolm and his feelings and your own infidelity. It has nothing to do with love and heaven; really it hasn’t. You’ll see it yourself some day. Let’s go away at once, darling, and get married.” The urgency of what he now saw as escape was suddenly so strong in him that he really meant it, really planned, while he spoke, the Southern flight; Tony deposited at her safe London house that very evening and the license bought next day. Why not? Wasn’t it the only way with her? As long as she was allowed to hesitate, her feet would remain fixed in this quagmire.
She hardly heard his words; he saw that as she turned her eyes on him; but she heard his ardour and it had broken down her withdrawal.
“I’m so frightened, Bevis,” she murmured. “You don’t understand. You are so bitter; so cruel. You frighten me more than I can tell you. I seemed to see, just now, when you said that, about getting over me,that I should lose your love, and his love, too; that that would be my punishment.”
This, after all, was a fear easy to deal with. He passed his arm in hers and drew her from the window, feeling a foretaste of the final triumph as he did so, for, child, adorable child that she was, she had forgotten already the former fear.
“But you know what a nasty, cantankerous creature I am, darling,” he said, making her walk up and down with him. “You don’t really take my flings seriously. And didn’t you begin! How like a woman! What a woman you are! You know that I shan’t get over you. And I assure you that I don’t think less well of Malcolm’s fidelity.”
“But the bitterness, Bevis. Why were you so bitter?” Her voice trembled. “I am never bitter with you.”
“And I’m never bitter with you—though I’m a bitter person, which you aren’t. You know perfectly well that it was Miss Latimer whose neck I wanted to wring.—Beastly little stone-curlew, with her stare and her wailing.”
“It felt like my neck. Was it only Cicely’s, then? Poor little Cicely.”
“Poor little Cicely as much as you please. Only I’m sick of her, and want to get away from her, and to get you away. Seriously, Tony, why shouldn’t we be off at once?”
“At once?” Her wavering smile, while her eyes dwelt on him, showed the plaintive sweetness of reviving confidence. “But that’s impossible, dear, absurd Bevis.”
“Why impossible?”
“Why I couldn’t get married like that; at a day’s notice. And I couldn’t run away. I’m not afraid of Cicely, though you seem to be. And I couldn’t leave her like that, when I’ve only just arrived. It would be too unkind.”
The fact that she felt it necessary to argue it all out was in itself a good augury. He could afford to relinquish his project, though he did so reluctantly. “I’m not afraid of her,” he said. “Except when she frightens you.”
“She doesn’t, Bevis. You are the only one whofrightens me; when you tell me the truth; when you tell me that I am unfaithful and that I’ve fallen in love with you, although my husband isn’t really dead; and that perhaps, if I go on tormenting you too much, you’ll get over me.” She looked steadily at him while she spoke, though still she tried to smile.
“Do you want another truth, Tony?” he said, putting her hair back from her forehead, doting on her, in her loveliness, her foolishness, her pathos, while he drew her more closely to him; “it’s the last that frightens you most of all, and it never can come true.”
“Never? Never?” she whispered, while she, too, came closer, yielding to his arms. “Nothing can ever come between us? You will be able to take care of me, always?”
“It’s all I ask,” he assured her, with his dry, cherishing smile.
HE had learned to distrust Antonia’s recoveries, but that evening it would have been difficult to believe that their troubles were not over. The very drawing-room, as they came back to it after dinner, looked, he felt, like the drawing-room of a lovely young widow who was soon to marry again. It seemed, with clustered candles, and flowers where he had never seen them before, no longer to wait upon events, but to celebrate them, and Antonia herself, standing before the fire and knitting, in absurd contrast to her bare arms and pearl-clasped hair, a charity sock, had herself an air of celebration and decision. It was for him, he felt, that her hair had been so clasped, and, as she knew he loved to see it, tossed back from her brow. For him, too, the dress as of a Charles the First lady, with falls of lace at elbow and the lace-edged cape held with diamonds and pearls at her breast. Long pearls were in her ears—he had not seen them there since before the war—and pearls around her throat, and, beloved and unaccountable creature, why, unless in some valiant reaction to life and sanity, should she show this revival?
“What shall we do to amuse ourselves to-night, Cicely?” she asked. She had never asked it before. It had never before been a question of amusing themselves. But, though Miss Latimer, evidently, had “cried and cried,” she herself was not without signs of the evening’s magic. Her little pre-war dress, pathetic in its arrested fashion, its unused richness, became her. She, too, wore pearls, and she, too, oddly, with the straight line of her fringe across her forehead, recalled, all pinched and pallid though she was, the court of Charles the First. No one could have looked less likely to be amused, yet she struck him, to-night, as almost charming.
“Shall we have some dummy-bridge?” Antonia went on. “Cicely is very good at bridge, Bevis.”
“By all means,” said the young man, smiling across at her from the sofa where he smoked. “Shall I get a table?”
He would really rather, he felt, for a little while,sit and smoke, his hands clasped behind his head, and watch Antonia’s hands move delicately among the knitting-needles.
“Or,” she went on, starting a new row of her sock, “shall it be table-turning? Cicely is good at that, too. It always turns for her. Do you remember the fun we’ve had with it, Cicely? The night the Austins dined and it hopped into the corner. And the night it rapped out that rude message to Mr. Foster. I feel a little stupid for bridge.”
“Yes. I remember. He was very much displeased,” said Miss Latimer.
“Comically displeased. He took it all so seriously—though he pretended not to mind. Do you feel like trying it, Cicely? You are the medium, of course. It never did anything without you.”
Miss Latimer did not, for some moments, raise her eyes from the fire. She seemed to deliberate. When she looked up it was to say, “One hardly could, with only three.”
“Why, we were only three when it went so well, with you and me and poor Mr. Foster.”
“I imagine he had power.”
“Well, Bevis may have power. Have you ever sat, Bevis?”
“Once or twice. I’m sure I have no power. And it’s not a game I like.” He felt, as he spoke, that he disliked it very much. So strongly did he dislike it that he wondered at Antonia for her suggestion.
“Why, how solemn you are, Bevis! It’s only a game, as you say. I believe you really are a little scared of it, like Mr. Foster, and think it may rap out something rude. You have a guilty secret, Bevis!”
“Many, no doubt.”
“You do believe in it, then?—that it’s supernatural?”
From his sofa, over his cigarette-smoke, his eye at this met hers with a sort of reminder, half grim, half weary. “Still catechisms?” it asked her.
She laughed, and now he knew that in her laugh he heard bravado.
“As if a game could be!” she answered herself. “At the worst it’s only Cicely’s subconscious trickery. Isn’t it, Cicely? Are you tired? Will you try it?I’m longing for it now. It’s just what we need. It will do us good.”
“I am not tired. But why do you think a game will do us good, Antonia?” Miss Latimer asked.
Antonia looked down at her fondly; but did he not now detect the fever in her eye. “Games are good for dreary people. We are all dreary, aren’t we? I know, at least, that I am. So be kind, both of you, and play with me.”
“Miss Latimer is tired,” said Bevis, looking across at her, feeling reluctance in her colourless replies. “And I’m tired, too. We’d both rather, far, play bridge.”
But to this Miss Latimer at once said coldly: “No, I am not tired. Bridge is the more tiring of the two.”
“Of course it is. We can all go to sleep around the table, if we like. It’s in the corridor, isn’t it? I’ll get it.” Antonia tossed aside her knitting and moved away.
For a moment, after she had left the room, the young man sat on, his hands still clasped behind his head, and contemplated Miss Latimer, meditating afurther appeal. But her pale little profile, fixed impassively on the fire, offered no hint of response. Much as she might dislike the game, she would never take sides with him against Antonia. Any appeal that might be made must be to Antonia herself, and, after the moment’s pause, he rose and limped after her.
She was outside in the broad balustraded corridor from which one looked down into the hall, and she had lifted a bowl of flowers from a little mahogany table that stood there.
Bevis closed the door behind him. He, also, laid his hands on the table, arresting her.
“Tony,” he said, “give it up.” The door was closed, but he spoke in a low voice. “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” She, too, spoke in a low voice; and she stood still, her eyes on his.
“I don’t like it,” he repeated. “It’s not right. Not now. After what’s happened in these years.”
Oh, what a blunder! What a cursed blunder! He saw, as he spoke the words, the fire they lighted in her. She had been an actress, dressed for a part, pretendinggaiety and revival to inveigle him into an experiment. Over the table, her hands hard grasped upon the edge, she kept her eyes fixed on him.
“Youdobelieve in it, then?—That the spirits of the dead speak through it?”
Cursed blunder! How pale she had become, as if beneath the actress’s rouge. There was no laughter left, or pretence of gaiety.
“No: I don’t believe it’s spirits. I believe, as you said, that it’s subconscious trickery. And it’s not a time to mess about with it. That’s all. It’s ugly: out of place.”
“If it’s only that—subconscious trickery—that’s what I believe too—why should you mind so much;—or even ugliness?”
“And why should you want so much to do it, if that’s all you believe? It’s because you believe more, or are afraid of more, that I ask you to give it up.”
“But isn’t that the very reason why you should consent? So that my mind may be set at rest? Don’t be angry with me, Bevis. That frightens me morethan anything—as you told me. I am not afraid of this, unless you make me so by taking it so seriously.”
She had him there, neatly. And why should he mind so much? He did mind, horridly. But that was all the more reason for pretending not to.
“Very well,” he said dryly. “I’m not angry. I don’t consent, though; I submit. Here; let me carry it for you.”
But he had forgotten his leg. He stumbled as he lifted the table and could only help Antonia carry it into the room and set it down before the fire.
“There; it will do nicely there,” said Antonia. “And those three little chairs.” Her voice was still unsteady.
Miss Latimer looked round at them as they entered, and then rose. “Isn’t this table a little rickety?” she asked, placing her finger-tips upon it and slightly shaking it.
“It’s the one we always use,” said Antonia. “It’s quite solid. If you wanted to tip it, you couldn’t.”
“I’ve seen larger and firmer tables tipped, by peoplewho wanted to,” said Miss Latimer. “I have, I am sorry to say, often seen people cheat at table-turning.”
“You don’t suspect Bevis, or me, I hope!” laughed Antonia, taking her place.
“Not at all. But people don’t suspect themselves,” said Miss Latimer. She, too, sat down.
“It’s very good of you, of both of you, to humour me,” said Antonia, still laughing. “I promise you both not to cheat.”
“Shall I put out the lamps?” asked Bevis coldly.
And it was still Antonia who directed the installation, replying: “Oh, no; that’s not at all necessary. We have never sat in the dark. It was broad daylight, before tea, with Mr. Foster.”
Bevis took his place and they laid hands lightly upon the table.
“And we may go on talking,” Antonia added.
But they did not talk. As if the very spirit of dumbness had emanated from their outspread hands, they sat silent and Bevis felt at once the muffled rhythm of their hearts beating in syncopated measure.The pulsations were heavy in his finger-tips and seemed to be sending little electric currents into the wood beneath them. Observant, sceptical, and, with it all, exasperated, he watched himself and felt sure that soon the table, yielding to some interplay of force, would begin to tip. Long moments passed, however, and it did not stir, and after his first intense anticipation his attention dropped, with a sense of comparative relief, to more familiar uses. He had not looked at either of his companions, but he now became aware of them, of their breathing and their heart-beats, with an intimacy which, he felt, turning his thoughts curiously, savoured of the unlawful. People were not meant to be aware of each other after such a fashion, with consciousness fallen far below the normal mental meeting-ground to the fundamental crucibles of the organism, where the physical machinery and the psychical personality became so mysteriously intermingled. There, in the first place—it pleased him to trace it out, and he was glad to keep his mind occupied—there lay the basis of his objection to the ambiguous pastime. As hemeditated it, his awareness of this intimacy became so troubling that, withdrawing his thoughts from it decisively, he fixed them upon the mere visual perception of Antonia’s hands, and Miss Latimer’s. Miss Latimer’s were small, dry, light. The thumb curled back, the palm was broad, the finger-tips were squared, though narrow. He had no link with them, no clue to them, and, though he strove to see them as objects only, as pale patterns on the dark wood, he was aware, disagreeably, that he shrank from them and their hidden yet felt significance.
Antonia’s hands he knew so well. But he was not to rest in the mere contemplation of their beauty. Everywhere, to-night, the veils of appearance were melting before the emergence of operative yet, till now, unrecognized reality; and so it was that Antonia’s hands, as he looked at them, ceased to express her soft, sweet life, its delicacy, its mournfulness, its merriment, and, like the breathing and the heart-beats, conveyed to him the mysterious and fundamental sources of her being, all in her most potent and most unconscious. Laid out upon the darkness,they were piteous hands; helpless and abandoned to destiny.
And his own? Small, delicately fashioned, if resolute, they expressed his own personality in what it had of closest and most alien. He did not like himself, seen at these close quarters, or, rather, he frightened himself. The physical machinery was too fragile an apparatus in his construction. It did not secure him sufficiently. It did not sufficiently secure Antonia. Nerves rather than flesh and blood made his strength, and flesh and blood, dogged, confident, and blind, was a better barrier against fear than mere intelligence. There was more fear in him now than in Antonia, or he was more aware of what was to be feared—which came to the same thing. While she wandered sadly in dreams and abandoned herself to peril because she did not know where peril lay, he saw and felt reality, sharply, subtly, like a scent upon the breeze, like a shadow cast by an unseen presence; and because he was so subtle, so conscious, and so resolute, he was responsible. That was what it came to for him, with a suddenness that hadin it an element of physical shock. It was he alone who saw where peril lay and he alone who could withhold Antonia from thus spreading her spirit upon the darkness.
He looked back at her hands and a pang of terror sped through him. Something had happened to them; something had passed from them, or into them. He was an ass, of course, an impressionable, nervous ass; yet he saw them as doomed, unresisting creatures; and, while he still controlled himself to think, feeling himself infected with the virus of the horrid game, the table suddenly, as if with a long-drawn, welling sigh, stirred, rose—he felt it rising under his fingers—and slowly tipped toward Miss Latimer.
It was then Antonia who said, as if with frivolity, “We’re off!” Miss Latimer sat silent, her head bent down in an attitude brooding and remote.
The table, returning to the level, after a pause rocked slowly to and fro. “Cicely, if it raps, will you say the alphabet for it, while I spell?” Antonia murmured. He recognized the forced commonplace of her voice. Miss Latimer bowed her head in answer.
The table rocked more and more violently. Antonia had half to rise in her chair to keep her hands upon it as it tipped from her toward Miss Latimer. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was still, and then he heard a soft yet sharp report, as if of a small electric shock in the very wood itself.—One, two, three; a pause; and—One, two, three, again. A rhythm distinct and detestable.
Conjecture raced through his mind. He had said that he had played the game; but he had only seen the table turned and tipped; he had never heard these sounds. Unable to distrust his senses, though aware that any one else’s he would have distrusted, he located them in the very wood under their hands. They did not come from Miss Latimer’s toe-joints; nor from his or Tony’s. Well, what of it? It was some oddity of magnetism, like the tipping, and, now that the experience was actually upon them, he felt, rather than any panic, a dry, almost a light curiosity, seeing, with relief for his delay, that to have interfered, to have stopped the game and made a row, would have been to dignify it and fix it in Tony’s unsatisfiedmind stamped with a fear more definite than any she had felt.
“Are you there?” Miss Latimer was saying, in a prim, automatic voice, as of one long accustomed to these communions—“One for No, and three for Yes and two for Uncertain. Is that agreed?”
The table rapped three times.
“Are you ready? Shall I begin the alphabet?”
Again three raps.
Her voice now altered. It was almost dreamily, with head bent down, that she began, evenly, to enumerate the letters. “A, B”—a rap fell neatly at the second sound. “B,” Antonia announced. Miss Latimer resumed: “A, B, C, D, E”—another rap arrested her.
“Oh—it is going to be ‘Bevis'!—It’s for you, Bevis!” Antonia murmured.
“Rap!” said the table.
“That is No. It is not for Captain Saltonhall,” said Miss Latimer drowsily and, drowsily, she took up the alphabet. The table, uninterrupted by any comment, spelled out the word, “Beside.”
“Beside. How odd,” said Antonia.
It was very wearisome. Already they seemed to have sat there for hours. His fear had not returned; but curiosity no longer consciously sustained him. An insufferable languor, rather, fell upon him and fumes of sleep seemed to coil heavily about his eyelids. He wished he could have a cigarette. He wished the thing would go more quickly and be over.
“T,H,E,” had been spelled out and Antonia had reported “the.” Miss Latimer’s drugged voice had taken up the alphabet again and the table had rapped at “F.”
Now the word demanded nearly the whole alphabet for the finding of its letters. “O” came. Then “U.”
Antonia sat still. Her eyes were fixed, strangely, devouringly, upon Miss Latimer, whose head, drooping forward, seemed that of a swooning person. “F,O,U,N,T,” she spelt.
Not till then did it flash upon him, and it came from Antonia’s face rather than from the half-forgotten phrase.
He sprang up, stumbling, nearly falling, catchingat Antonia’s shoulder to right himself. “Stop the damned thing!” he exclaimed, and he lifted her hands. “It’s quoting you!”
Miss Latimer’s hands slid into her lap. She sat as if profoundly asleep.
Antonia rose from her place, and at last she looked at him. “Beside the fountain. Beside the fountain. He is there,” she said.
He had seized her arms now as if to hold her back more forcibly.
“Nonsense!” he cried loudly. “Miss Latimer is a medium—as you know. Her subconsciousness got at yours. They are the words you used the other morning.”
“He is there,” she repeated; “and I must see him. He has come for me. And I must see him.”
He held her for a moment longer, measuring his fear by hers. Then, releasing her, “Very well,” he said. “I’ll come too. We shall see nothing.” But he was not sure.
They crossed the room, Antonia swiftly going before him. She paused so that he might come up withher before she drew back the curtain from the third window. The moon was high. The cedar was black against the brightness. They looked down into the flagged garden and saw the empty moonlight. Empty. Nothing was there.
“Are you satisfied?” Bevis asked her. He placed his arm around her waist and a passionate triumph filled him. Empty. They were safe.
Motionless within his grasp she stared and stared and found nothing. Only the fountain was there, a thin spear of wavering light, and the fritillaries, rising like ghosts from their narrow beds.
“Are you satisfied?” Bevis repeated. They seemed measurelessly alone there at the exorcised window, alone, after the menace, as they had never been. He held her closely while they looked out, putting his other arm around her, too, as if for final security. “Will you come away with me to-morrow?” he whispered.
She looked at him. No; it was not triumph yet. Her eyes were empty; but of him, too. They showed him only a blank horror.
“What does it mean?” she said.
Dropping the curtain behind them, he looked round at Miss Latimer. Had she just moved forward? Or for how long had she been leaning like that on the table, her head upon her arms?
“It means her,” he said. “She read your fear; she saw it. Have you had enough of it, Tony? Have you done playing with madness?”
“How could she read my fear? I was not thinking of it. I had forgotten it. It was not she. It came from something else.” She was shuddering within his arms, and her eyes, with their devouring question, were on the seated figure.
“No, it didn’t. From nothing else at all. It came from you and from me—and from her; all of us together. It was some power in her that conveyed it to our senses.”
“You, I, and she—and something else,” said Antonia. She drew away from him and went toward the fire, but so unsteadily that she had to pause and lay her hand on a chair as she went. At the table she stopped. Miss Latimer still sat fallen forward upon it. Silently Antonia stood looking at her.
“She’s asleep, I think,” said Bevis. He wished that she were dead. “It has exhausted her.”
Antonia put out her hand and touched her. “It never was like this before.—Yes,” she said, after a pause, “she is breathing very quietly. She must be asleep. And I will go now.”
She moved away swiftly; but, striding after her, he caught her at the door, seizing her hand on the lock.
“What do you want?” she said, stopping still and looking at him.
He said nothing for a moment. “You mustn’t be alone,” he then answered.
“What do you mean?” she repeated, and she continued to look at him with a cold gentleness. “I must be alone.”
“I must come with you. I make my claim; in spite of what you feel; for your sake.”
Still with the cold gentleness, she shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You couldn’t say that, if you understood. Good-night.”
When she had closed the door behind her, he stoodbeside it for a long moment, wondering, even still, if he should not follow her. Then he remembered Miss Latimer, sleeping there—or was she sleeping?—behind him. He went back round the screen. She had not stirred and, after looking at her for a moment, he leaned over her, as Antonia had done, and listened. She was breathing slowly and deeply, but now he felt sure that she was not asleep. The pretence was a refuge she had taken against revelations overpowering to her as well as to Antonia. She was not asleep, and should he leave her alone in the now haunted room?
Restless, questioning, he limped up and down; and, going again to the window, he drew the curtain and again looked out. Nothing. Of course nothing. Only the fountain and the white fritillaries, strange, ghostly, pallid, and brooding. Well, they would get through the night. To-morrow should be the end of it. He promised himself, as he turned away, that Antonia should come with him to-morrow.
HE heard, as he waked next morning, that it was heavily raining. When he looked out, the trees stood still in grey sheets of straightly falling rain. There was no wind.
The mournful, obliterated scene did not oppress him. The weather was all to the good, he thought. He had always liked a rainy day in the country; and ghosts don’t walk in the rain. If Malcolm hadn’t come in the moonlight, he wouldn’t come now. He felt sunken, exhausted, and rather sick; yet his spirits were not bad. He was fit for the encounter with Antonia.
When he went down to the dark dining-room, darker than ever to-day, he found only one place laid. The maid told him that both the ladies were breakfasting in their rooms. This was unexpected and disconcerting. But he made the best of it, and drank his coffee and ate kedgeree and toast with not too bad an appetite. A little coal fire had been lighted inthe library, and he went in there after breakfast and read the papers and wrote some letters, and the morning passed not too heavily. But, at luncheon-time, his heart sank, almost to the qualm of the night before, when he found still only one place laid. After half an hour of indecision over his cigarette, he wrote a note and sent it up to Antonia.
“Dearest Tony, You don’t want to drive me away, I suppose? Because I don’t intend to go. When am I to see you? I hope you aren’t unwell? Yours ever, BEVIS.”
The answer was brought with the smallest delay.
“Dearest Bevis, I’m not ill, only so dreadfully tired. Cicely will give you your tea and dine with you. I will see you to-morrow. Yours ever, TONY.”
This consoled him much, though not altogether. And the handwriting puzzled him. He had never seen Tony write like that before. He could infer from the slant of the letters that she had written in bed; but it was in a hand cramped and controlled, as though with surely unnecessary thought and effort.
He was horridly lonely all the afternoon.
Tea was brought into the library and with it came Miss Latimer. She wore rain-dashed tweeds and under her battered black felt hat her hair was beaded with rain. At once he saw that she was altered. It was not that she was more pale than usual; less pale, indeed, for she had a spot of colour on each cheek, but, as if her being had gathered itself together, for some emergency, about its irreducible core of flame, she showed, to his new perception of her, an aspect at once ashen and feverish; and even though in her entrance she was composed, if that were possible, beyond her wont, his subtle sense of change detected in her self-mastery something desperate and distraught.
She did not look at him as she went to the tea-table, drawing off her wet gloves. The table had been placed before the fire, and Bevis, who had risen on her entrance, dropped again into his seat, the capacious leather divan set at right angles to the hearth, its back to the window. Miss Latimer, thus, facing him across the table as she measured out thetea, was illuminated by such dying light as the sombre evening still afforded.
They had murmured a conventional greeting and he now asked her if she’d been out walking in this bad weather. It was some relief to see that she had not been with Tony the whole day through.
“Only down to the village,” she said. “There is a woman ill there.”
He went on politely to enquire if she weren’t very wet and would not rather change before tea—he wouldn’t mind waiting a bit; but she said, seating herself and pouring on the boiling water, that she was used to being wet and did not notice it.
He was determined not to speak of Antonia and to ask no questions. To ask questions would be to recognize the new bond between her and Antonia. But, unasked, emphasizing to his raw consciousness his own exclusion, she said: “Antonia is so sorry to leave you alone like this. She had one of her bad nights and thought a complete rest would do her good.”
He reflected that it was more dignified to show strength by generosity and to play into her hands. “Does she have bad nights?” he asked.
“Oh, very. Didn’t you know?” said Miss Latimer. “She’s obliged to take things.”
“Drugs, do you mean?” He had not known at all. “That’s very bad for her.”
“Very bad. But her doctor allows it apparently.”
“She took one last night and it did no good?”
“None at all. I hope she is getting a little sleep now. Sugar?” Miss Latimer poised a lump before him in the tongs and, on his assent, dropped it into his cup. Could two creatures have looked more cosy, shut, for the blind-man’s-holiday hour, into the tranquil intimacy of the studious room, with the even glow of its tended fire, the cheer of its humming kettle, the scented promise of its tea-table? She passed him toasted scones from the hot-water-basin and offered home-made jam. He wanted no jam, but he found himself quite hungry, absurdly so, he thought, until he remembered that he had really eaten no lunch. He was coming, now that the opening had been made,and while he ate his scone, to a new decision. It was the moment, and perhaps the only one he would have, for finding out just how much she counted against him. He determined, if it were necessary, on open warfare.
“I don’t think Wyndwards suits Tony,” he said.
“Don’t you?” Miss Latimer returned, but quite without impertinence. “She’s always been very well here before.”
“Before what?”
“Her husband’s death,” Miss Latimer replied.
“Yes,” said Bevis, disconcerted. “Well, it’s that, perhaps.”
“It is that undoubtedly,” said Miss Latimer. Her voice, high and piping, was as dry and emotionless as her horrid little hands. What control it showed that it should be so! He felt that he hated her; hated her the more that she was not wishing to score off him as he wished to score off her. Yet he did not dislike her, if one could draw that distinction. And now he noticed, as she lifted her cup, that her hand trembled, as if with the slight, incessant shaking of palsy. Thefear of an emergency burned in her. He felt sure that she, too, had not slept.
“Well, it all comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?” he said. “Since Malcolm’s death the place oppresses her. Quite naturally; and it would be much better that she should leave it; as soon as possible.”
“I don’t think it would do Antonia any good to leave Wyndwards,” said Miss Latimer, not looking at him.
“You think it would do her good if I did, I imagine,” Bevis commented, with his dry laugh. “Thanks awfully.”
She sat silent.
“You saw, of course, last night, how it was with us,” he said. “Perhaps you saw it before.”
Still she was silent, and for so long that he thought she might not be going to answer him. But she replied at last. “No; not before. I did not suspect it before.”
Ah! He had an inner triumph. She hadn’t had her head down all the time; he was sure of it now. She had, when they went to the window, watched them.He did not quite know why this certainty should give him the sense of triumph; unless—was that it?—it pointed to some plotting secret instinct in her. “Yet you must have wondered how I came to be here—so intimately,” he said.
“No; I did not wonder,” said Miss Latimer. “I know that young women nowadays have friendships like that. I knew that you had been Malcolm’s friend.”
“You did not see that it was more than friendship till last night?”
She paused, but only for a moment. “I saw that you were in love with her from the first.”
“But only last night saw that we were in love with each other?”
Again she did not reply. Turning her head slightly aside, as if in distaste for the intimacies he forced upon her, she took up the tea-pot and, still with that slightly, incessantly, shaking hand, poured herself out a second cup of tea.
He would not pause for her distaste. “I am afraid you dislike it very much.”
To this she replied, “I dislike anything that makes Antonia unhappy.”
He owned that it was a good answer. Leaning back in the divan, his foot crossed over his knee, his hand holding his ankle, he contemplated his antagonist. “My point is that it wouldn’t make her unhappy if she came away,” he took up. “If she came away and married me at once. It’s the place and its associations that have got upon her nerves.—How much you saw last night!”
She had poured out the cup and she raised it automatically to her lips while he spoke. Then, untasted, she set it down, and then, with the effect of a pale, sudden glare, her eyes were at last upon him.
“I do not know what you mean by nerves. Antonia is not as light as you imagine,” she said. “She loved her husband. She does not find it easy to forget him here, it is true; but I do not think she would find it easy if she left his home with another man.”
“No one asks her to forget him,” said Bevis. She could not drink her tea, but he passed his cup, blessing the bland ritual that made soft, sliding links in anencounter all harsh, had it been unaccompanied, with the embarrassment of their antagonism. “May I have another cup, please?” There was a malicious satisfaction, too, in falling back upon the ritual at such a moment. “With a little water?—I cared for Malcolm. I have no intention of forgetting him.”
Her eyes were still on him, and distraction, almost desperation, was working in her, for, though she took his cup as automatically as she had lifted her own, though she proceeded to fill it, it was, he noted with an amusement that almost expressed itself in a laugh—he knew that he was capable of feeling amusement at the most unlikely times and places!—with the boiling water only. She put in milk and sugar and handed it to him, unconscious of the absurdity.
“I did not mean in that sense,” she said.
“I should like to know what you do mean.” He drank his milk and water. “I should like to know where I am with you. Do you dislike me? Are you my enemy? Or is it merely that you are passionately opposed to remarriages?”
She rose as he asked his questions as if the closenessof his pursuit had become too intolerable. “I do not know you. How could I be your enemy? I only dislike you, because you make Antonia unhappy.”
“Would you like me if I made her happy?”
The pale glare was in her eyes as she faced him, her hands on the back of her chair. “You can never make her happy. Never. Never,” she repeated. “You can only mean unhappiness to her. If you care for her, if you have any real love for her, you will go away, now, at once, and leave her in peace.”
“So you say. So you think. It’s a matter of opinion. I don’t agree with you. I don’t believe it would be to leave her in peace. You forget that we’re in love with each other.” He, too, had risen, but in his voice, as he opposed her, there was appeal rather than antagonism. “Let us understand each other. Is it that you hate so much the idea of remarriages? Do you feel them to be infidelities?”
She had turned from him, but she paused now by the door, and it was as if, arrested by the appeal, she was willing to do justice to his mere need for enlightenment. “Not if people care more for some one else.”
Care more? He did not echo her phrase, but he meditated, and then, courageously, accepted it. “And if they can, you don’t hate it?”
At that she just glanced at him. He seemed to see the caged prisoner pass behind his bars and look out in passing; and he saw not only what her hate could be, but the dark and lonely anguish that encompassed her.
“People should be true to themselves,” was all she said.
When she was gone, Bevis, characteristically, went back to the table and made himself a proper cup of tea. He had managed to make tea for himself and a wounded Tommy when he had lain, with his shattered leg, in No Man’s Land.
MISS LATIMER did not come to dinner and he was thankful for it, though there was little to be thankful for, he felt, as he sat in the library afterwards and wondered what Tony was thinking of there in the darkness above him, if she were alone and in the dark. The thought that she was not, the thought that Miss Latimer, with her stone-curlew eyes and pallid, brooding face, was with her made him restless. He could not read. He threw his book aside and stared into the fire.
Next morning the rain had ceased and it was cold and sunny. He found Miss Latimer in the dining-room when he went down. She was already dressed for going out and had started her breakfast. “My poor friend in the village is dying,” she said, “and has asked for me. I have a message to you from Antonia. She is still resting this morning, but will come down at three, if you will be in the library then.”
Her courteous terseness put barriers between them; but none were needed. He could not have asked questions or appealed this morning. He imagined, though he had looked at his face in the mirror with unregarding eyes, that he, too, was perceptibly aged, and his main feeling about Miss Latimer was that she was old and ugly and that he was sick of her.
After breakfast he went out into the hard, bright air.
He walked about the grounds and found himself looking at the house with consciously appraising eyes, from the lawn, from the ring-court, from the kitchen-garden. It was a solid, tasteful, graceful structure; mild, with its sunny façade looking to the moors; cheerful, with its gable-ends; but as he had felt it at the first he felt it now more decisively as empty of tradition and tenderness. It had remained, too, so singularly new; perhaps because, in its exposed situation, none of the trees carefully disposed about it had yet grown to a proportionate height. Yes, notwithstanding the passion and grief now burning within its walls, it was impersonal, unlovable; and itwould need centuries, in spite of the care and love lavished upon it, to gain a soul.
He knew, as he walked, that he was taking comfort from these reflections and was vexed that he should need them. He had completely placed, psychologically, if not scientifically, the events of the other evening, and it was not necessary that he should be satisfied that Wyndwards was a place to which the supernatural could not attach itself. Yet that desire, indubitably, directed his wanderings, and he could compute its power by the strength of the reluctance he felt for visiting the flagged garden where, if anywhere, the element he thankfully missed might lurk. But when, putting an ironic compulsion upon himself, he had entered the little enclosure, his main impression, as before, was one of mere beauty. It was the only corner of Wyndwards that had achieved individuality; the placing of the fountain, the stone bench, the beds among the flags, was a pleasure to the eye. And like a harbinger of good cheer, he heard, from the branches of the budding wood beyond the garden wall, the wiry, swinging notes of a chiff-chaff,and his own soul as well as the flagged garden seemed exorcised by that assured and reiterated gladness. Ghosts, in a world where chiff-chaffs sang, were irrelevancies, even if they walked. And they did not walk. In sunlight as in moonlight he found the flagged garden empty.
He sat down on the stone bench for a little while and watched the fountain and listened to the chiff-chaff, while he lighted a cigarette and told himself that the day was pleasant. With reiteration the bird’s monotonous little utterance lost its special message for him and dropped to an accompaniment to thoughts that, if unhaunted, were not happy, in spite of the pleasant day. He felt that he hated silent, sunny Wyndwards. He cursed the impulse that had brought Antonia there, and him after her. It had seemed at the time the most natural of things that his young widowed friend should ask him to pay her a spring visit in her new home. His courtship of her, laconic, implicit, patient, had prolonged itself through the dreary London winter following the Armistice, and springtime on the moors had seemedfull of promise to his hopes. Alas! why had they not stayed in safe, dear, dingy London, London of tubes and shops and theatres, of people and clever tea- and dinner-tables? There one lived sanely in the world of the normal consciousness, one’s personality hedged round by activity and convention from the vagrant and disintegrating influences of the subliminal, or the subconscious, whichever it might have been that had infernally played the trick of the other evening. He sat there, poking with his stick at the crevices between the flags, and the song of the chiff-chaff was his only comfort.
Miss Latimer did not return to lunch, and he was in the library waiting for Tony long before the appointed hour. She came before it struck, softly and suddenly entering, turning without a pause to close the door behind her, not looking at him as she went to the fire and leaned there, her hand upon the mantelpiece. She was dressed in black, a flowing gown with wide sleeves that invested her with an unfamiliar, invalided air; but her hair was beautifully wreathed and she wore her little high-heeled satin shoes, tyingabout the instep. For a moment she stood looking down into the fire; then, as she raised her face, he saw the change in her.
“Why, Tony,” he said gently, “you look very ill.”
Her eyes only met his for a moment and, instinctively, he kept the distance they measured.
“I’m not very well,” she said. “I haven’t been able to sleep. Not for these two nights.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Don’t take drugs,” he said after a moment. “Miss Latimer tells me that you take drugs. I didn’t know it.”
“It’s very seldom,” she said, with a faint, deprecatory smile. “I’m very careful.”
Still he felt that he could not approach her, and it was with a sense of the unmeet, or at all events the irrelevant, that he helplessly fell back on verbal intimacy. “You could, I am sure, sleep in the train to-night; with me to look after you.”
She said nothing to this for a moment, but then replied, as though she had really thought it over:“Not to-night; Cicely won’t get back in time. Her poor woman is dying; she couldn’t leave her. But to-morrow; I intend to go to-morrow; with Cicely.”
“Leaving me here?” he enquired, with something of his own dryness, so that, again with the faint, defensive smile, she said: “Oh—you must come with us; we will all go together; as far as London. We are going down to Cornwall, Bevis, to some cousins of Cicely’s near Fowey.”
He came then, after a little silence, and leaned at the other end of the mantelpiece. “What’s the matter, Tony?” he asked. He had not, in his worst imaginings, imagined this. She had never before spoken as though they were, definitely, to go different ways. And she stood looking down into the fire as if she could not meet his eyes. “You see,” he said, but he felt it to be useless, “I was right about that wretched table business. It’s that that has made you ill.”
“Yes; it’s because of that,” she said.
“You must let me talk to you about it,” he went on. “I can explain it all, I think.”
“It is explained,” she said. Her voice was cold and gentle, cold, it seemed to him, with the immensity of some blank vastness of distance that divided them. And a cold presage fell upon him, of what he could not say; or would not.
“You would not explain it as I would,” he said. “You must listen to me and not to Miss Latimer.”
“It is all explained, Bevis,” she repeated. “It was true. What it said was true.”
“How do you mean, true?” he asked, and he heard the presage in his voice.
“He is there,” she said, and now he knew why she was far from him, and what the stillness was that wrapped her round. “He comes. Cicely has seen him. She saw him there that night. Beside the fountain.”
It was, he saw it now, what he had expected, and his heart stood still to hear it. Then he said: “You mean that she tells you she sees him; that she thinks she sees him; since he’s come just as you led her to expect he would, and just where.”
She shook her head gently and her downcast face kept its curious, considering look. “It wasn’t I, noryou, nor Cicely. He was with us. We could see nothing, you and I. He could not show himself to us; we had put ourselves too far from him. But when we left her alone, Cicely went to the window and saw him standing in the moonlight. He was not looking up at her, but down at the fritillaries. She and he planted them there together, before we were married. And all the while she looked, he stayed there, not moving and plainly visible. I knew it. I knew he was there when I looked, although I could see nothing.” She spoke with an astonishing and terrifying calm.
“And she came at once and told you this? That night?”
“Not that night. She went down into the garden. She thought he might speak to her. But he was gone. And when she came back and looked from the window, he was gone. No; it was next morning she told me. She tried not to tell; but I made her.”
“Curious,” said Bevis after a silence, “that she could have talked to me yesterday afternoon, and given me my tea, as if all this had never happened.” But he knew as he spoke that it had not been so with Miss Latimer. Something had happened; he had seen it when she was with him; and he now knew what it had been.
Gibes and scepticism fell as idly upon Antonia as faint rain. She was unaware of them. “No; she would never speak to you about it. There was no surprise in it for her, Bevis. She has always felt him there. When we went to the window she thought that we should surely see him, and when we did not, she pretended to sleep, purposely, so that we should go and leave her to look out. It comforted her to see him. It was only for me she was frightened.”
“Yes; I rather suspected that,” he muttered. “That she was shamming. I didn’t want to leave her there alone.”
“You couldn’t have kept her from him always, Bevis,” Antonia said gently. “If it had not been then, she would have seen him last night, I am sure; because I am sure he intended her to see him, meant and longed for it. But it was only the one time. Last night he was not there.”
He left the fire and took a turn or two up and down the room. His thoughts were divided against themselves. Did he feel, now, when, after all, the worst had happened, less fear, or more, than he had felt? Did he believe that Miss Latimer had lied? Did he believe Malcolm had appeared to her? And if Malcolm had, in very truth, appeared, did it make any difference? After all, what difference did it make?
“Tony,” he said presently, and really in a tone of ordinary argument, “you say it was only for you she was frightened. What frightened her, for you?”
She thought this over for a little while. “Wasn’t it natural?” she said at last. “She knew how I should feel it.”
“In what way feel it?”
“She knew that until then I had not really believed him still existing,” said Antonia, with her cold, downcast face. “Not as she believed it; not even as you did. She knew what it must mean.”
“That when you really believed, it must part us?”
“Not only that. Perhaps that, alone, would not have parted us. But that he should come back.”
Still she did not look at him, and he continued to limp up and down, his eyes, also, downcast. He, too, was seeing Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain, as he had seen him when first Antonia had told him of her fear. He had visualized her thoughts on that first day; and though, while they sat at the table, he had not remembered Tony’s fear, it had doubtless been its doubled image that had printed itself from their minds upon Miss Latimer’s clairvoyant brain. But now, seeing his dead friend, as he always thought of him, the whole and happy creature, a painful memory suddenly assailed him, challenging this peaceful picture of Malcolm’s ghost; and he was aware, as it came, as he dwelt on it, of a stir of hope, a tightening of craft, in his veins and along his nerves. Subtlety, after all, might serve better than flesh and blood. This, he was sure, was a memory not till then recalled at Wyndwards; and it might strangely help him.
“Tony, how was Malcolm dressed when she saw him?” he asked.
“In his uniform.” He had avoided looking at herin asking his question, but he heard from her voice that she suspected nothing. “As he must have been when he was killed.”
As he must have been when he was killed. Tony had played into his hands.
“Bareheaded, or with his cap?”
She did not answer at once, and, raising his eyes, he saw that now she was looking at him. “Bareheaded. Yes,” she assented. And she repeated, “As he was when he was killed, Bevis.”
“Did he look pale?—unhappy?”
“Very calm,” she said.
“Nothing more?” He had his reasons; but, alas, she had hers.
Her eyes dwelt on him as she answered: “Yes. Something more. Something I did not know. Something Cicely did not know.” She measured what he kept from her, with what a depth of melancholy, seeing his hope; as he, abandoning hope, measured what she had, till then, kept from him. “They told me that Malcolm was shot through the heart, Bevis. It was not only that. I don’t know why they felt itkinder to say that. They told you the truth. There was something more. You do know,” she said. Her eyes were on his and he could not look away, though he felt, sickening him, that a dull flush crept revealingly to his face.
“I know what?” he repeated, stupidly.
“How he was killed. That’s what Cicely saw.”
“She got it from my mind,” he muttered, while the flush, that felt like an exposure of guilt, dyed his face and, despite his words, horror settled round his heart. “She’s aclairvoyante. She got the khaki from us both and the wound in the head from me.”
Now her eyes dropped from him. He had revealed nothing to her, except his own hope of escape. He had brought further evidence; but it was not needed. She was a creature fixed and frozen in an icy block of certainty.
“A wound in the head,” she repeated. “A terrible wound. That was what Cicely saw. He must have died at once. How did you know, Bevis? You were not with him.”
“Alan Chichester told me,” said the young man hoarsely. “The other was true too. The shot in the breast would have been enough to kill him. It was instantaneous; the most merciful death. And he was not disfigured, Tony.”
She rested pitying eyes upon him. She pitied him. “His features were not touched; not on the side he turned to her,” she answered. “But Cicely saw that half his head was shot away.”
His busy mind, while they spoke, was nimbly darting here and there with an odd, agile avoidance of certain recognitions. This was the moment of moments in which to show no fear. And his mind was not afraid.—Clairvoyance; clairvoyance; it repeated, while the horror clotted round his heart. As if pushing against a weight he forced his will through the horror and went back to his place at the other end of the mantelpiece; and, with a conscious volition, he put his hand on hers and drew it from the shelf. “Tony dear,” he said, “come sit down. Let us talk quietly.”—Heaven knew they had been quiet enough!—“Here; let me keep beside you. Don’t take your hand away. I shan’t trouble you. Listen, dear. Even if it were true, even if Malcolm came—and I do not believe he comes—it need not mean that we must part.”
She had suffered him to draw her down beside him on the leathern divan and, as she felt his kindly hand upon her and heard his voice, empty of all but an immense gentleness, tears, for the first time, rose to her eyes. Slowly they fell down her cheeks and she sat there, mute, and let them fall.
“Why should you think it means he wants to part us?” he asked in a gentle and exhausted voice. He asked, for he must still try to save himself and Tony; yet he knew that Miss Latimer had indeed done something to him; or that Malcolm had. The wraith of that inscrutability hovered between him and Tony, and in clasping her would he not always clasp its chill? The springs of ardour in his heart were killed. Never had he more loved and never less desired her. Poor, poor Tony. How could she live without him? And wretched he, how was he to win her back from this antagonist?
He had asked his question, but she knew his thoughts.
“He has parted us, Bevis. We are parted. You know it, too.”
“I don’t! I don’t!” Holding her hand he looked down at it while his heart mocked the protestation. “I don’t know it. Life can cover this misery. We must be brave, and face it together.”
“It can’t be faced together. He would be there, always. Seeing us.”
“We want him to be there; happy; loving you; loving your happiness.”
“It is not like that, Bevis.” She only needed to remind him. The reality before them mocked his words. “He would not have called to us if he were happy. He would not have appeared to Cicely. He is not angry. I understand it all. He is trying to get through, but it is not because he is angry. It is because he feels I have gone from him. He is lonely, Bevis; and lost. Like the curlew. Like the poor, forgotten curlew.”
When she said that, something seemed to breakin his heart, if there were anything left to break. He sat for a little while, still looking down at the hand he held, the piteous, engulfed hand. But it was a pity not only for her, but for himself, and, unendurably, for Malcolm, in that vision she evoked, that brought the slow tears to his eyes. And then thought and feeling seemed washed away from him and he knew only that he had laid his head upon her shoulder, as if in great weariness, and sobbed.
“Oh, my darling!” whispered Tony. She put her arms around him. “Oh, my darling Bevis. I’ve broken your heart, too. Oh, what grief! What misery!”
She had never spoken to him like that before; never clasped him to her. He had a beautiful feeling of comfort and contentment, even while, with her, he felt the waters closing over their heads.
“Darling Tony,” he said. He added after a moment, “My heart’s not broken when you are so lovely to me.”
Pressing her cheek against his forehead, kissinghim tenderly, she held him as a mother holds her child. “I’d give my life for you,” she said. “I’d die to make you happy.”
“Ah, but you see,” he put his hand up to her shoulder so that he should feel her more near, “that wouldn’t do any good. You must stay like this to make me happy.”
“If I could!” she breathed.
They sat thus for a long time and, in the stillness, sweetness, sorrow, he felt that it was he and Tony who lay drowned in each other’s arms at the bottom of the sea, dead and peaceful, and Malcolm who lived and roved so restlessly, in the world from which they were mercifully sunken. They were the innocent ghosts and he the baleful, living creature haunting their peace.
“Don’t go. Why do you go?” he said, almost with terror, as Antonia’s arms released him. She had opened her eyes; but not to him. Their cold, fixed grief gazed above his head. And the faint, deprecatory smile flickered about her mouth as, rising, she said: “I must. Cicely will soon be back. And Imust rest again. I must rest for to-morrow, Bevis dear.”
“We are all going away together? You will really rest?”
“All going away. Yes; I will rest.” Still she did not look at him, but around at the room. “I shall never see Wyndwards again.”
“Forget it, Tony, and all it’s meant. That’s what I am going to do. I am to travel with you?”
She hesitated; then, “Of course. You and I and Cicely,” she said.
“And I may see you in London? You’ll take a day or two there before going on?”
“A day or two, perhaps. But you must not try to see me, Bevis dear.” He had risen, still keeping her hand as he went with her to the door, still feeling himself the bereft and terrified child who seeks pretexts so that its mother shall not leave it. And he thought, as they went so together, that their lives were strangely overturned since this could be; for until now Tony had been his child. It had been he who had sustained and comforted Tony.
“Why do you go?” he repeated. “You can rest with me here: not saying anything; only being quiet, together.”