The rest of the day was barren, and in the knowledge that their visit
was so near its end, David chafed at each empty hour. He had seen Hilda
for a moment only since the morning. Standing aside as she came down the
stairs, he had asked her if she was going to the field again, and she
shook her head, saying that she had a letter to write. He thrilled with
the fancy that it might be a letter to himself.
How queer to think that she might even give it to him to post! Still
queerer to reflect that the thoughts which had so often held him
captive, and the blithesome chatter that had rung so false were coin
from the same mint. If they had been the strangers to each other that
she believed, he would never have divined the gold beneath the small
change. For that matter he too had been commonplace; the soul wasn't a
jack-in-the-box to jump to order. "Oh, Mr. Thackeray, don't!" breathed
Charlotte Brontë disillusioned, when he helped himself again to
potatoes; and probably he had said nothing to justify her homage by the
time the cheese came. He, David Lee, had _talked_ potatoes. More than
likely the girl whom he had found trivial had found him trite.
Ever recurring, and overthrowing his reverie, was a gust of
sensation--in part a perfume, in part a sickness, in which it seemed to
him that the scent of her hair was in his throat.
Before he left town he had scribbled a few lines expressing his
gratitude for the photograph, and now it occurred to him that an answer
might be lying at his lodging already. He wished he could read it; he
wished he could re-read all the letters here while he was seeing her.
He felt that to do so would help him. Without defining his need he felt
that the letters, tangible, familiar, would lessen the vague sense of
unreality that blew across his mind. During a few seconds he craved more
to re-read the letters than to find himself alone with her.
Not so in the morning. He rose eagerly. While he dressed, it seemed
to him that he had been unreasonable yesterday; he accused himself of
having resented circumstances, of having all unconsciously expected her
to accord to Tremlett the confidences she made to Lee. That was absurd.
Ostensibly a stranger, a mulatto thrown in her path by chance, how
could he hope for her to lift her veil? But let her keep it down--it
couldn't hide her from him. Let her yield a finger-tip, after she had
bared her heart--he knew her even as she knew herself. He smiled to
think that by a word he could transfigure her. It was too soon, he was
afraid to speak it; the complexity of the emotion that he foresaw in her
warned him back; but the idea of power was sweet to him. He could tear
the veil aside and call the real woman breathless to his view, he the
stranger! There was a throb of triumph in his delusion.
The day was Sunday, and when he joined her, he found the sisters
together. He regretted that the elder had remained at home, although he
knew that he had had nothing to hope from a tête-à-tête.
"You don't paint to-day, Miss Sorrenford?"
"No," she said, "I don't paint on Sunday."
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Hilda, "I should think she didn't. What
do you suppose the Kemps would say to her? We should be turned out,
shouldn't we, Bee?"
"Oh yes, I forgot the Kemps," he said; "it would shock them, of
course."--"Bee," he assumed, was a diminutive of "Beatrice." "I've only
spent one Sunday here. It was rather depressing; everybody looked so out
of place--all the villagers seemed to have gone. Why do they dress up
and spoil themselves on Sunday? It was as if a lot of supers in a play
had come on in the wrong scene."
Hilda smiled. "They'd think you had very bad taste if they heard you say
so. You might as well try to persuade a servant that she looks smarter
in a frilled cap and a muslin apron than when she goes out to meet her
young man. Poor people always make frights of themselves on Sunday--and
they pride themselves on their boots creaking."
"Poor people!" he answered. "And the little children--that was worse
still. It made me wretched to see the children; my heart ached for them
whenever I went to the door."
"Oh, you noticed them," said Bee, "did you? Yes, it's painful. Their
hushed voices, and their sad eyes! They mustn't play; they're forbidden
to be happy. They sit in solemn groups, talking in whispers--cursing
Sunday I often think. If one of them forgets and laughs, its mother
comes out and shakes it--to teach it to love God."
"Bee, don't get on the platform, or we might as well have gone to
church. We do go to church, Mr. Tremlett; don't think we never do any
better than this, please! But one doesn't feel so religious in the
country on Sunday as one does in a town. It must be something in the
air."
"Perhaps it's because in the country one feels so much more religious
every other day of the week," said David. Bee had frowned, discomfited;
she sat silent. In her silence David was sorry for the Beauty--her
banter had been so innocent; the frown, the tightened lips seemed to him
an undeserved reproach.
Then he talked to the wrong woman while the right woman listened, and he
was even a little piqued that his earnestness couldn't rouse the wrong
woman to permit him a glimpse of the poetry that was not in her. But
once, when her skirt fluttered against his hand, it was not the thought
of the poetry in her that sent a shiver up his arm; and it was not the
thought of her sensibility that made his heart gallop, as imagination
gave him back the tingle of her hair. That was herself, her pretty
flesh-and-blood, the potent pink-and-white reality of her.
Something he said, some chance remark, brought a line of "A Celibate's
Love Songs" to Bee's mind. Her thoughts darted again to the photograph,
and for the thousandth time she wished she could recall her stupid
act; for the thousandth time she sought the courage to acknowledge
it. The confession from which she had shrunk at the beginning looked
by comparison easy: "I am deformed." Well, at least, no one could
laugh at that. But "I sent my sister's likeness instead of my own."
That was ridiculous, contemptible. And how could she explain the
impulse? Wouldn't the man put his own construction on it? Wouldn't he
think--wouldn't it be tacitly to admit--that she was in love with him?
Still, did the folly she had committed matter very much? He would never
see her, never see her or Hilda either. If he had meant to come, surely
he would have come already? Sooner or later the correspondence would
die, and she would be alone again. Was it necessary to degrade herself
in his sight?
He would think she was in love with him! Once more the question that
she was always trying to evade flared through her brain. Did it really
mean that--in love with a man she had not met? She said the thing was
impossible, and felt it was indecent, and knew it was true. The man
had needed an appeal to the senses before he repudiated the term of
"friendship"; the woman had no such need. She knew that she loved him,
although she refused to own it. She loved him for his mind, for all
that was herself in him, for all that was kin to her, but beyond her
reach. And now, while her reverie might have borne her far from the
conversation at her side, she was forced to listen to him, though she
had no suspicion that it was he who talked. The mind that she loved
compelled her to listen--for David was striving to make the dainty Hilda
lift a corner of the veil.
And there being no veil, she could not lift it; but the woman, whose
presence he had half forgotten, felt her sympathies stirred within her
strongly, and could have given him thought for thought, and note for
note, while she sat there silent and unheeded. There was no veil. He
was straining to clutch a phantasm, surrendering to the temptations of
his fancied power. And, whilst the poet, pluming himself on power, put
forth his intellect to master the girl that there was not, the indolent
pink-and-white girl that there was, was mastering him.
"He talks too much, now he has got over his shyness," she murmured, as
he moved away. "I'm glad he has gone."
"Are you?" said Bee. "Why? I'm not; he interested me."
"Really? Well, I wish you had joined in, then, instead of sitting there
mum. Why didn't you?"
"I don't think he would have been very grateful; he didn't want to talk
to me."
Hilda's admirable eyebrows rose just a shade higher than they would have
risen if she had been surprised. Because she knew what was meant, she
said, "What do you mean?"
"I could see he wanted to talk to _you_. He always does. I think it's
rather a good thing we're going home to-morrow."
"Good heavens! don't be so idiotic. Do you suppose for a single moment I
could----"
"No; I was thinking of _him_, poor fellow!" said Bee. "I daresay he is
unhappy enough without any other trouble."
It was not unpleasant to hear that she was esteemed so dangerous. The
girl essayed the languid tone of her favourite heroines.
"What an imagination you have!" she drawled. "Now, he only struck _me_
as a dull person who didn't know when to get up. When a man looks like
that, he ought to be very careful what he talks about; so few subjects
go with his complexion."
Bee thought--"Oh, the arrogance of beauty! It would even deny to the
others the right to have beautiful minds."
In the afternoon a thunderstorm broke over Godstone, and rain fell
with more or less violence all the evening. It saved Hilda from being
bored by him again, for their train next day was an early one, and
after breakfast she was upstairs a good deal, watching the trunks being
packed. Once or twice as she tripped to Bee from the sitting-room with
a book, or a work-basket, or a packet of labels, he met her in the
passage, and she threw him the brave smile of one who was sunny in
fatigue; but there was no opportunity for conversation.
To David the shadow of her departure had fallen across Daisymead
already. Already he felt desolate in anticipating its emptiness when she
had gone. It seemed to him quite a month ago that he had arrived here,
and the few scenes of their brief association, now that the end had
come, were as dear to his regret as close companionship. Even the period
of his bashfulness and despondence had a tender charm in looking back
at it. He was eager to flee with his memories to town, instinctively
conscious that in no place would he be so forlorn as in the place where
she had been; but there would be heavy hours before he was able to go,
poignant hours in which to miss her first.
It had been in his mind to walk to the station with them both, but she
did not seem to wish it, so he bade them good-bye in the front garden
while the porter was making the luggage fast on the truck. The landlady
and her daughter had come out too, and at the last minute Mr. Kemp
appeared. He had a dead bird in his hand; Hilda uttered an exclamation
of pity as she saw it, and Bee was mute.
"Oh, the dear! What bird is it, Mr. Kemp?"
"A green linnet, Miss," he said. "Mischeevious things!"
"A linnet? I thought linnets were always brown; I'd no idea they were
ever so pretty as this. Why, it's perfectly lovely! What a shame they
aren't all made green."
"Yes, it's a showy thing," admitted Mr. Kemp; "the brown 'un ain't much
to look at alongside it, that's a fact." He rubbed his hand on his coat,
and put it out to her in farewell. "But the green linnet has got no
song."
The sisters went slowly up the road; and David followed the "showy"
figure with his eyes until the road swerved.