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 an encounter 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 closeness of 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.
VII
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 it would 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 seemed full 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, tying about 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, nor you, 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 her in 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 it kinder 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 a _clairvoyante_. 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 break in 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, kissing him 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 I must 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?"