"Si tu ne m'aimes pas moi je t'aime."
It was the time of afternoon tea. Miss Fane rolled off the sofa, and
with the hydraulic sniff that can temporarily suspend the laws of
nature, proceeded to pour out tea. Presently John and the dogs came in,
and Di, who had found Mrs. Courtenay's book without his assistance,
followed. John had not the art of small-talk. Miss Fane, who was in the
habit of attempting the simultaneous absorption of liquid and
farinaceous nutriment with a perseverance not marked by success, was
necessarily silent, save when a carroway seed took the wrong turn. She
seldom spoke in the presence of food, any more than others do in church.
Few things apart from the Bull of Bashan commanded Miss Fane's undivided
homage, but food never failed to, though it was reserved for plovers'
eggs and the roe of the sturgeon to stir the latent emotion of her
nature to its depths.
The dogs did their tricks. Lindo contrived to swallow all his own and
half Fritz's portion, but, fortunately for the cause of justice, during
a muffin-scattering choke on Lindo's part, Fritz's long red tongue was
able to glean together fragments of what he imagined he had lost sight
of for ever.
Di inquired whether there were evening service.
"Evening service at seven," said Miss Fane; "supper at quarter past
eight."
"Do not go to church again," said John. "Come for a walk with me."
Di readily agreed. It was very pleasant to her to be with John. She had
begun to feel that he and she were near akin. He was her only first
cousin. The nearness of their relationship, accounting as it did in her
mind for a growing intimacy, prevented any suspicion of that intimacy
having sprung from another source.
They walked together through the forest in the still opal light of the
waning day. Through the enlacing fingers of the trees the western sun
made ladders of light. Breast-high among the bracken they went,
disturbing the deer; across the heather, under the whisper of the pines,
down to the steel-white reeded pools below.
They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and a faint air came across
the water from the trees on the further side, with a message to the
trees on this. Neither talked much. The lurking sadness in the air just
touched and soothed the lurking sadness in Di's mind. She did not notice
John's silence, for he was often silent. She wound a blade of grass
round her finger, and then unwound it again. John watched her do it. He
had noticed before, as a peculiarity of Di's, not observable in other
women, that whatever she did was interesting. She asked some question
about the lower pool gleaming before them through the trunks of the
trees, and he answered absently the reverse of what was true.
"Then perhaps we had better be turning back," she said.
He rose, and they went back another way, climbing slowly up and up by a
little winding track through steepest forest places. Many burrs left
their native stems to accompany them on their way. They showed to great
advantage on Di's primrose cotton gown. At last they reached the top of
the rocky ridge, and she sat down, out of breath, under a group of
silver firs, and, taking off her gloves, began idly to pick the burrs
one by one off the folds of her gown.
There was no hurry. He sat down by her, and watched her hands. She put
the burrs on a stone near her.
They were sitting on the topmost verge of the crag, and the forest fell
away in a shimmer of green beneath their feet to the pools below, and
then climbed the other side of the valley and melted into the purple of
the Overleigh and Oulston moors. Far away, the steep ridge of Hambleton
and the headland of Sutton Brow stood out against the evening sky. Some
Tempest of bygone days had dared to perpetrate a Greek temple in a
clearing among the silver firs where they were sitting, but time had
effaced that desecration of one of God's high places by transforming it
to a lichened ruin of scattered stones. It was on one of these
scattered stones that Di was raising a little cairn of burrs.
"Forty-one," she said at last. "You have not even begun your toilet yet,
John."
No answer.
The sun was going down unseen behind a bar of cloud. A purple light was
on the hills. Their faces showed that they saw the glory, but the
twilight deepened over all the nearer land. Slowly the sun passed below
the leaden bar, and looked back once more in full heaven, and drowned
the world in light. Then with dying strength he smote the leaden bar to
one long line of quivering gold, and sank dimly, redly, to the
enshrouding west. All colour died. The hills were gone. The land lay
dark. But far across the sky, from north to south, the line of light
remained.
Di had watched the sunset alone. John had not seen it. His eyes were
fixed on her calm face with the western glow upon it. She did not even
notice that he was looking at her. One of her ungloved hands lay on her
knee, so near to him yet so immeasurably far away. Could he stretch
across the gulf to touch it? His expressionless face took some meaning
at last. He leaned a little towards her, and laid his hand on hers.
She started violently, and dropped her sunset thoughts like a surprised
child its flowers. Even a less vain man than John might have been cut to
the quick by the sudden horrified bewilderment of her face, and of the
dazzled light-blinded eyes which turned to peer at him with such
unseeing distress.
"Oh, John!" she said, "not you;" and she put her other hand quickly for
one second on his.
"Yes," he said, "that is just it."
Her mouth quivered painfully.
"I thought," she said, "we were--surely we _are_ friends."
"No," said John, mastering the insane emotion which had leapt within him
at the touch of her hand. "We never were, and we never shall be. I will
have nothing to do with any friendship of yours. I'm not a beggar to be
shaken off with coppers. I want everything or nothing."
Her manner changed. Her self-possession came back.
"I am sorry it must be nothing," she said gently, and she tried quietly
but firmly to withdraw her hand.
His grasp on it tightened ever so little, but in an unmistakable manner,
and she instantly gave up the attempt.
A splendid colour mounted slowly to her face. She drew herself up. Her
lightning-bright intrepid eyes met his without flinching. They looked
hard at each other in the waning light. Once again they seemed to
measure swords as at the moment when they first met. Each felt the other
formidable. There was no slightest shred of disguise between them.
There was a breathless silence.
Di went through a frightful revulsion of mind. The sunset and the light
along the sky seemed to have betrayed her. These pleasant days had been
in league against her. And now, goaded by the grasp of his hand on hers,
her mind made one headlong rush at the goal towards which these
accomplices had been luring her. Where were they leading her? Glamour
dropped dead. Marriage remained. To become this man's wife; to merge her
life in his; to give up everything into the hand that still held hers,
the pressure of which was like a claim! He had only laid his hand upon
her hand, but it seemed to her that he had laid it upon her soul. Her
whole being rose up against him in sudden passionate antagonism horrible
to bear. And all the time she knew instinctively that he was stronger
than she.
John saw and understood that mental struggle almost with compassion, yet
with an exultant sense of power over her. One conviction of the soul
ever remains unshaken, that whom we understand is ours to have and to
hold.
He deliberately released her hand. She did not make the slightest
movement at regaining possession of it.
John wrestled with his voice, and forced it back, harsh and unfamiliar,
to do his bidding.
"Di," he said, "I believe in truth even between men and women. I know
what you are feeling about me at this moment. Well, that, even that, is
better than a mistake; and you were making one. You had not the
faintest suspicion of what has been the one object of my life since the
day I first met you. The fault was mine, not yours. You could not see
what was not on the surface to be seen. You would have gone on for the
remainder of your natural life liking me in a way I--I cannot tolerate,
if I had not--done as I did. I have not the power like some men of
showing their feelings. I can't say the little things and do the little
things that come to others by instinct. My instinct is to keep things to
myself. I always have--till now."
Silence again; a silence which seemed to grow in a moment to such
colossal dimensions that it was hardly credible a voice would have power
to break it.
The twilight had advanced suddenly upon them. The young pheasants crept
and called among the bracken. The night-birds passed swift and silent as
sudden thoughts.
Di struggled with an unreasoning, furious anger, which, like a fiery
horse, took her whole strength to control.
"I love you," said John, "and I shall go on loving you; and it is better
you should know it."
And as he spoke she became aware that her anger was but a little thing
beside his.
"What is the good of telling me," she said, "what I--what you know
I--don't wish to hear?"
"What good?" said John, fiercely, his face working. "Great God! do you
imagine I have put myself through the torture of making myself
intolerable to you for no purpose? Do you think that you can dismiss me
with a few angry words? What good? The greatest good in the world, which
I would turn heaven and earth to win; which please God I will win."
Di became as white as he. He was too strong, this man, with his set
face, and clenched trembling hand. She was horribly frightened, but she
kept a brave front. She turned towards him and would have spoken, but
her lips only moved.
"You need not speak," he said more gently. "You cannot refuse what you
have not been asked for. I ask nothing of you. Do you understand?
_Nothing._ When I ask it will be time enough to refuse. It is getting
late. Let us go home."