with a bare arm round his bare legs and his other hand dipped in the
water. She never knew when he got into the boat or when she got into it
herself; but he was speaking, as they came in sight of the Blue Grotto,
and this time she determined to see his face.
"The river is not wide enough for oars," he explained.
"I was afraid I had lost you."
"I love you. I will take wonderful care of you. You will stay?"
"We must go on."
The Blue Grotto changed to a horse-shoe doorway, through which she could
see a valley of swaying corn studded with poppies. At the doorway their
narrow river ended, and a ripple of water lapped and washed over the
granite steps.
"I will carry you," he said. "You must not wet your feet."
"I am too heavy. You are only a child."
He laughed, and she found herself in his arms with her cheek pressed
against his and one hand drawing back the hair from her eyes.
"At the end," she began, looking over the corn and poppies to a strip of
white road winding out of the valley and merging in a white haze on the
horizon.
"Stay with me! You are happy. And you love me."
"I love you.... But we must go on."
She ran ahead, trailing her fingers through the waving ears of corn, and
looked over her shoulder. He had thrown himself on the ground, but, when
she faltered back, he knelt and drew her to him.
"Stay with me! I love you!"
"If you love me, kiss me!"
She stood over him with her head thrown back until he sprang up and
clasped her in his arms.
"I will never let you go!"
"You must let me go. I have to go on."
"But you are happy?"
"Yes! I am happy ... happy...."
She had run on alone, with his kiss still on her lips, and had reached
the last height of the strip of white road before she awoke. She heard
her own whispered "happy," but she was frightened....
Her bedroom was full of sunshine, and Barbara opened her arms to
welcome it. She was sitting up, when her mother came in, turning the big
illustrated pages of "The Blue Bird"; it was the last thing that she had
read before going to sleep and she wanted to see again the Kingdom of
the Future and the "halls of the Azure Palace, where the children wait
that are yet to be born." The opalescent doors and the blue ephods of
the children were still vivid to her; when she fell asleep, she had been
reading of "the two holding each other by the hand and always kissing
... the Lovers," who spent "their day looking into each other's eyes,
kissing and bidding each other farewell" ... because they could not be
born into the world at the same time.
"Darling, you're looking better," said Lady Crawleigh.
"Yes, I had a wonderful night," answered Barbara. "I'm going to get up
to-day. I'm going out. I want to be in the sun."
She laid aside the book and began her breakfast.
"Dr. Gaisford's coming to see you at twelve," Lady Crawleigh reminded
her.
"Oh, we'll telephone and put him off. He'd much sooner be told that I'd
gone out. But he can give me some more of that medicine; it makes me
sleep. And I'm quite hungry."
She hurried through breakfast and ran into her bathroom, eager to be by
herself, where she could piece together her dream before it faded from
her memory. The voice of the child-lover was the voice that she had
heard in the train. If he ever kissed her again, she would know him,
though she seemed never to have seen his face. Perhaps she would never
see him, perhaps Destiny had contrived that they should always be lovers
and should never meet, perhaps this was why she had felt frightened on
waking. It was absurd, but delightful. She wanted to meet her
playmate.... And it was a long time to wait until she could go to bed
and dream of him again.
She ran into the Park, because she had been running in the dream; it
was more natural; she was a child again, in a mood of unclouded
happiness. The passers-by paused to stare and smile, but she smiled back
at them and waved her hand. A young officer shot by in a car, turned
round and stopped to ask if he could give her a lift, as she seemed to
be in a hurry. "It's only lightness of heart," she explained with
dancing eyes. The officer looked wonderingly at her and drove to his
club, where he described the encounter and opined that Lady Barbara
Neave ("It couldn't have been any one else") had apparently gone
suddenly mad.
In the Park she found O'Rane basking on a chair in the sunshine and
crumpling the silky ears of his Saint Bernard. She sat down beside him,
panting for breath and challenging him to guess who she was.
"I knew before you spoke," he answered. "No one else in London wears
quite so many carnations to the square inch. I smelt them the moment you
came within range."
"I have them sent up three times a week from the Abbey. I'm going to put
one in your button-hole as a prize for being so clever."
"Oh, I can be much cleverer than that, when I try," he laughed. "Lady
Barbara, either the sunshine's gone to your head--it always does with
me; so much of my misspent life has been in the sun, I feel starved in
England--; either that, or something very remarkable has happened to
you. You've got a different voice, you're a different person. The last
time----"
"Ah, don't talk about it," she interrupted. "I'm happy to-day."
"I know you are! If I painted you to-day, there'd be a riot of blue----"
"Blue? How funny!"
"The blue of a cloudless sky. That's how I _see_ happiness. Tell me
what's happened?"
"I just feel well and happy. I had a wonderful dream. I was about four,
and there was a little boy with the most enchanting voice----"
O'Rane laughed and began to sing under his breath:
"'Long years ago--fourteen, maybe,
When but a tiny babe of four,
Another baby played with me,
My elder by a year or more--
A little child of beauty rare
With wondrous eyes and marvellous hair...!'
Good heavens! The last time I sang that song was at Oxford! A man called
Sinclair--I'd been at school with him; he was killed at Neuve Chapelle;
he was President ... The old Phoenix Club. Jim was there, and Jack
Summertown, and George Oakleigh, and Eric Lane, the new playwright, and
Jack Waring.... I suppose there's no news of him?"
"I don't think so," Barbara answered soberly. The name took away her
lightness of heart and robbed the very sunshine of its glory.
"And I made a bet with Jim," said O'Rane after a moment's musing. "Tell
me about your dream," he added abruptly.
"Oh, I couldn't! It's sacred! Besides, I don't remember very much about
it except that he was the most adorable little boy in the world.... _I_
was rather adorable, too, with my little bare feet. And _he_ fell in
love with _me_, and _I_ fell in love with _him_. I _had_ been feeling
wretchedly ill and miserable, but I'm happy now. I think the only thing
to do now is to find him and insist on marrying him; we should be
wonderfully happy together, because I've never loved any one as I loved
that child. How does one start?"
O'Rane shook his head sadly.
"We've no machinery for romance now. In the old days you'd have sat on a
throne with your hair in two enormous plaits and a gold crown set with
sapphires, and your father would have caused all the men in his kingdom
to pass in front of you, and you'd have stepped suddenly forward, when
you saw your lover, and you'd have taken him by the hand and made room
for him by your side, and both of you would have lived happily ever
afterwards."
"The sunshine's gone to your head, too! Why are we sitting still? I want
to run about.... Mr. O'Rane, what _would_ happen if I took off my shoes
and stockings in Hyde Park?"
"_You_ can do anything, Lady Barbara."
"Yes, but people would say that I was doing it for effect. I don't do
things for effect. I do things because I _want_ to, because I can't help
myself. Long before I believed in Destiny, I felt that there was
something inside me stronger than my will...."
She broke off and began thinking again of her dream. In this white
sunshine it was easy to discount it, to talk of excited nerves, to trace
the dream itself to the book which she had been reading; but, as she lay
between sleep and waking, all had been too real to discount. Destiny had
decreed the meeting, as Destiny decreed her smallest impulse.
A shadow fell across her feet. She started and looked up to find
Oakleigh standing before her.
"I'm glad to see you about again," he said. "I've come to take Raney
away to lunch with the Poynters. Sonia's not here yet?"
"She said she might be a few minutes late," answered O'Rane. "Lady
Barbara and I have been sitting in the sun, telling each other how happy
we are." O'Rane sat up to catch a sound too indistinct for the others.
"And here's Sonia," he added. "We must fly, Lady Barbara, or we shall be
horribly late, but won't you walk with us?"
"I'm afraid I must go back," she answered.
Barbara watched the two men walking away with Sonia between them.
O'Rane was stooping to keep his fingers inside the great Saint Bernard's
collar. Though he was blind, he was happier than she was; though he was
blind, he had heard and recognized Sonia's footstep before she did. Some
change of mood had overtaken her, and she traced it back to the moment
when he asked whether she had received news of Jack....
A car was standing at the door of her house, and she found Dr. Gaisford
in the hall.
"Oh, I'm so sorry! I _meant_ to tell you I was so much better that I'd
gone out," she apologized, rallying under her mother's eye.
The doctor noted the quick dilation of pupil and restless change of
expression.
"As I've caught you, I may as well overhaul you," he said.
"But I'm all right now," Barbara protested.
"That's good hearing," answered Dr. Gaisford, but none the less he
persevered in his examination, unmoved by a flash of petulance, which he
did not fail to note, and by a spasm of nervous, contrite amiability,
which he noted no less carefully. At the end he was puzzled and
dissatisfied.
"You say that there _was_ a change this morning?" he asked Lady
Crawleigh as he left.
"She was a different girl. Now she's as irritable and melancholy....
Doctor, _is_ this simply the result of overwork, or is it something
more?"
It was as far as her mother would unbend towards suggesting that Barbara
had anything on her mind. The doctor guessed the purpose of her
question, but he felt that she was better qualified to answer it than he
was.
"What do you mean by 'something more'?" he asked.
"Oh, well.... You know...."
"If we can get her _body_ right and her _nerves_ right," he answered,
"everything else will come right. She's very highly strung, she's been
taking a great deal out of herself all her life; and the war deals such
an all-round blow that, if there _is_ a weak place, we're all of us
bound to feel it."
He piled vagueness on vagueness and then took his leave. Barbara was
suffering from more than overexcited nerves, but he could not yet
diagnose her complaint. There was no suggestion of drink, no trace of
drugs, but she had been in his care for several weeks and she refused to
shew any improvement. With the best intentions, a woman in her state
never told a doctor the truth about herself; and any doctor who had
attended Barbara since childhood knew better than to waste his time in
trying to make her confide in him.
"I'll come in again on Tuesday or Wednesday," he promised Lady Crawleigh
on the door-step. "Then we can talk about sending her into the country.
At present I think she'd only mope."
Barbara spent the afternoon at a concert and dined at home with her
parents. She went to bed immediately after dinner, drank her medicine
and lay with her pillows heaped under her shoulders and the big
illustrated "Blue Bird" open against her knees. When she was too tired
to read any longer, she turned out the light and settled lower into the
bed with her hands clasped under her head, as Peter Ibbetson had lain
night after night, waiting for Mary, Duchess of Towers, "healthily tired
in body, blissfully expectant in mind."
Drowsiness advanced on her from a distance, perceptibly. She dulled her
senses to the far-away echo of footsteps in the house, to the shooting
glint of moonlight, silver-grey on the cream-coloured blankets as her
curtain bellied in the breeze, to the scent of her beloved carnations,
stirred into fragrance as the curtains moved. Drowsiness deepened, but
she could not fall asleep; her body lay defiantly in London, where she
could still hear a drone of noises, however much she whispered that she
was alone in the world--and waiting.
Even her eyes refused to remain closed, but she decided that Destiny
must have forced them open, for the curtains blew apart and she saw the
boy standing at the foot of her bed. His face was in shadow, and he
stood with his hands clasped in front of him, looking down.
"Ah!"
At the sound of her voice he looked up, but his face was still hidden.
"My dearest, I have waited for you so long! All day!" she whispered.
"And I have waited for you all my life. I love you."
"And I love you. You will stay?"
It was his turn to shake his head; and he swept sharply towards the
door. Barbara sprang out of bed and caught him by the hand.
"You _shall_ not go!"
"I cannot stay here. You will come with me?"
"I must stay here."
"If you come with me, I will take care of you always. You will be
happy."
"I must stay here."
"Before, you would not stay. Now, you will not come."
His hand slipped from her fingers, and she saw him pass through the door
into a formless marble gallery. His blue ephod shone brilliantly against
the grey walls, then faded and lost all colour until she could no longer
see him. The gallery foreshortened and grew dark until she felt
suffocated. She could see the darkness and a shadow at her feet darker
still. Something was holding her back; if she could spring across the
forbidding shadow.... Unless she sprang, she would be stifled. Yet to be
stifled was to win peace ... or to send her mad....
When she awoke, Lady Crawleigh was once more standing over her.
"Where was I this time?" asked Barbara dully.
"Darling, you must have had a nightmare. You were calling out, so I came
to see what was the matter."
"But where was I? What did I say?"
"You didn't say anything. You were just--moaning."
"They were stifling me!" she sobbed.
"No, darling, you'd only got your face among the pillows so that you
couldn't breathe properly. What were you dreaming about?"
Barbara looked at her mother and summoned all her resolution to say
nothing. It was wonderful to have any resolution left.... But Destiny
had decided that she was to say nothing....
"I believe I'm going mad!" she whispered.
Lady Crawleigh tried to comfort her, but the girl shrank to the far side
of the bed. It came to this, then, that she could no longer trust
herself to go to sleep. For one night she had been in Heaven ... or in
sight of Heaven.... She could not understand what had impelled her
forward from the Garden and the Valley. Some one, something was waiting
for her--on the lowest terrace, on the horizon where the white ribbon of
road wound out of sight. Something called her away from the child in the
blue ephod. And to-night Destiny had set an angel with a flaming sword
to bar her path when she tried to follow him. Yet it was not an angel
that she could see nor a sword that she could feel; it was an
inhibition, an Authority.... Why not call it Destiny? It was something
that kept her from the boy with the wistfully caressing voice, who loved
her and promised to make her happy.... Something that frightened her,
something that was sending her mad.
"I always said you oughtn't to sleep with all those pillows," sighed
Lady Crawleigh.
"You can take them away, if you like. Good-night, mother. I hope I
didn't frighten you. I'm going to sleep again now."
She waited until she was alone and then sprang out of bed. If she slept,
the shadow would return ... Jack's shadow; she mustered courage to call
it by its right name. You could not go to sleep, if you walked up and
down, up and down all night.... At three o'clock she stripped a row of
glass beads from a dress and poured them into her shoes. You could not
go to sleep, if every step made you wince with pain and bite your lip to
keep from crying.... When her maid came in, Barbara was asleep, with
smarting eyes and tears on her cheeks, huddled at the side of her bed.
One foot had a blister as big as a young pea....
She breakfasted and dressed feverishly to escape from the house before
her mother was up and before the doctor could mouth his inanities about
"getting the nerves right, dear child, and then everything else will be
right."
"I don't expect I shall be back to lunch," she told her maid.
Soon she was in St. James' Park, because Destiny sent her there....
Government cars were racing down the Mall; a procession of officers
poured into Whitehall, and by the statue of James II she saw Oakleigh
and O'Rane walking arm-in-arm towards the Admiralty. George would tell
her that she did not look quite so well; O'Rane would mark her voice and
paint his conception of her with such blazing splashes of his "red for
pain" as seeing eye had never beheld. She turned and ran up the Duke of
York's Steps; Destiny had decided that she was to escape these two for
once....
To meet Lady Poynter in Bond Street was to be flung against reality and
made sane.
"My dear Babs! How wretched you're looking," she heard; and the shops,
the taxis and the passers-by steadied to immobility. They were
gloriously solid; they would frown on her, if she screamed or ran away.
"I'm feeling rather wretched," she answered in a recognizable voice. "I
had rather a bad night."
"Your mother told me you were disgracefully overworked at the hospital,"
said Lady Poynter. "Now, what we's all got to do is to arrange a little
holiday for you----"
Barbara smiled and shook her head. Yet it was no use shaking your head
when Destiny had flung Lady Poynter across your path. If Destiny had
arranged for her what might, for argument's sake, be called a
holiday....
"I haven't made up my mind what I'm going to do," she answered.
"Then let me make it up for you! What are you doing to-night?"
"I believe mother's got some people dining."
"Well, see if you can't put them off and dine with us."
Barbara closed her eyes until she felt herself rocking. If Destiny meant
her to dine with Lady Poynter....
"I should like to," she said.
"Then I shall expect you. At a quarter past eight. In Belgrave Square.
It's only quite a small party. Have you met this new dramatist, Eric
Lane? I've got him coming."
There was a conspiracy to force them together. George had tried, Sonia
had tried. What was the good of meeting any one, if Jack's ghost
intervened to thrust them apart? Eric Lane ... Eric Lane.... When she
died, they would find "Eric Lane" on her heart. A neat monogram: "E. L."
... Barbara found herself trembling.... If Destiny meant her to meet
Eric Lane....
"I was invited to meet him, but I couldn't go."
"You'll fall in love with him," Lady Poynter prophesied.
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's note: |
| |
|Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.|
| |
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