Above the titanic shoulder of the hill the tiny bare white shoulder of
the moon shrugged itself into view.
"I can't!" I pleaded. "Not now."
"My dear, you must. If I go out to-night I go out--wondering."
I began to tell him. I told him all about meeting Cheneston in the
searchlight, and how the mistake about our being engaged had started. I
told him that Grace Gilpin and Cheneston loved each other. I told him
all about somebody writing to Cheneston's mother and telling her that
Cheneston was engaged to me. I told him how fearfully ill she was, and
that I had gone to Cromer Court because she so passionately wanted to
see her son's future wife.
"But why did you come to me?" he said.
The moonlight was sweeping down the hill to us now, an incoming tide of
limpid silver. I looked out of the window desperately.
"I told Cheneston you and I cared--I wanted him to feel free to marry
Grace. This morning he--he was coming to you--Cheneston was--he was so
afraid you would misunderstand my being at Cromer Court, and think I had
ceased to care for you. Also this morning I had a note from Grace
Gilpin telling me you were here, asking me what I was going to do about
it."
"And they--Grace and Cromer--believe there is some understanding between
us, that we grew to care for each other when the four of us went about
together?"
"Yes," I said desperately; the hill suddenly seemed to tip towards me,
it seemed to carry with it the smell of iodoform and disinfectant.
And then the amazing and paralysing thing happened: Captain Markham
suddenly put his arm round me.
"Well," he said, "isn't it true, Pam! My God! child, isn't it _true_?
Don't I love you?--you ridiculous child, you wonderful, wonderful thing
with your strange crooked little mouth and your great eyes! Oh! Pam,
my little, little girl--didn't you know I cared!"
The hill tipped back into place like a giant sitting back on its
haunches, and the silver tide seemed to ripple down it to ultimately
engulf us.
*X*
Love is a cloak and is made in different styles; some people wrap
themselves tightly in it, and there is only just enough to go round
them: it is their cloak, and if Cupid himself, dimpled and in his
birthday suit, came and sat beside them on the top of a motor-bus in the
rain, they wouldn't go shares. For other people Love is a large cloak,
voluminous and overlapping, and capable of sheltering, warming, and
comforting quite a lot of people round the hem.
My heart ached for him as I sat beside him. He held my hand very tightly
with his thin fingers, almost like a frightened child, and I had a
feeling that he feared to drift out and I was his anchor, and I wished
that I could drift out with him.
"Pam," he said once or twice, and I had a feeling as if he were saying
"Mother," and I answered, "Yes, dear," and by-and-by he smiled and
whispered again, "Pam."
The matron kept coming in and out. Once or twice she fed Walter Markham
with a teaspoonful of brandy, once she brought me a cup of bovril; she
seemed just the same as when I first met her hours ago, like warm snow
immeasurably deep.
"Human vitality is at its lowest in the small hours," she whispered.
She looked down at Walter Markham. I looked at her. "I don't know,"
she said. "I don't know."
I sat on. It was so quiet in there--the world seemed like a very young
baby asleep, the moonlight flooding over the hill to diffuse a sort of
white holiness, an effortless tranquillity.
They had said that Walter Markham could not live through the night, and
yet I was not sorry for him. I only wanted to be immensely good to him
while he lived, to send him out happy.
"Pam," he said, "I sort of hear you singing--are you singing?"
"Perhaps my heart is."
"What songs, Pam?"
"Lullabies, dear, lovely, gentle lullabies."
"Not love-songs, Pam?"
"No."
"Love-songs suit you best," he said.
I tried to see the future, sitting there. I thought the peace and the
moonlight might help me, it seemed to make things so beautifully
abstract and impersonal that the planning hardly hurt at all. In all my
plans I never contemplated Walter Markham living and loving me, and
believing I had come to him because I loved him. I saw myself leaving
the hospital and going back to Cromer Court. I knew that Cheneston's
sympathy and gratitude would be my particular Garden of Gethsemane.
I wondered a little why Life and Love should always peck and beat and
burn me, and I wondered for the first time without resentment.
The house surgeon came in; he wore a long white linen coat over pink and
white pyjamas, and apologised for his costume, and I went and walked in
the moonlit corridor with the matron.
"It will be a triumph if we save him," she said--"but it will be your
triumph."