XVII
On the afternoon of the fourth day Boyne stood again in the sitting-room
of the _châlet_ facing the Cristallo group.
He had wired to Judith Wheater: “All right, don’t worry”; but to Mrs.
Sellars he had made no sign. He knew she did not wholly approve of his
journey, though she had made no unfavourable comment, and had even
offered of her own accord to keep an eye on the _Pension Rosenglüh_ in
his absence. It was not necessary for Rose Sellars to formulate
objections; they were latent everywhere in her delicate person, in the
movements of her slim apprehensive fingers, the guarded stir of her
lashes. But the sense of their lurking there, vigilant guardians of the
threshold, gave a peculiar quality to every token of her approval. Boyne
told himself that she was not a denier, but that rarer being, a chooser;
and he was almost certain where her choice would lie when all the facts
were before her.
She was out when he reached the _châlet_, and his conviction
strengthened as he sat awaiting her. It drew its strength from the very
atmosphere of the place—its self-sufficing harmony. “_Willkommen,
suesser Daemmerschein!_” His apostrophe took in the mighty landscape
which overhung him; the sense of peace flowed in on him from those great
fastnesses of sun and solitude, with which the little low-ceilinged
room, its books and flowers, the bit of needle-work in the armchair, the
half-written letter on the desk, had the humble kinship of quietness and
continuity. “I’d forgotten that anything had any meaning,” he thought to
himself as he let the spell of the place weave its noiseless net about
him.
“Martin—but how tired you look!” She was on the threshold, their hands
and lips together. He remembered that kiss afterward.... She lingered
close, her arms on his shoulders. “I didn’t even know you’d got back.”
There was the faintest shadow of reproach in her tone.
“I didn’t know till the last minute when I could get away—I just jumped
into the first train,” he explained. He was conscious of the weariness
in his voice. He passed his hand over his eyes as though to see if it
would brush away her image, or if there were still women like her in the
world, all made of light and reason. “Dear!” he said, more to himself
than her.
“You’ve failed?” Her eyes were full of an unmixed sympathy; there was
nothing in them to remind him that they had foreseen his failure.
“No,” he exclaimed, “I’ve succeeded!”
“Oh—.” He fancied he detected a hint of flatness in the rejoinder; there
are occasions, he knew, when one has to resign oneself to the hearing of
good news. But no; he was unfair. It was not that, it was only the echo
of his own fatigue. For, as she said, he was tired—thoroughly tired....
She continued, with a faint smile: “You don’t look like somebody who has
succeeded.”
“I daresay not. I feel rather like one of the fellows they let down into
a disused well, and haul up half-asphyxiated....”
“It was—asphyxiating?”
“Some of it; most of it. But I’m coming to. And I’ve got what I wanted.”
He returned her smile, and sat down beside her.
“How wonderful! You mean to say you’ve reconciled the Wheaters?”
“I’ve reconciled them to the idea of not separating the children—for the
present, at any rate.”
“Oh, Martin—splendid!” She was really warming to the subject now. Her
face glowed with a delicate appreciation. “It will do Terry more good
than all the Alps and Dolomites piled on top of one another.”
“Yes; and Judith too, incidentally.” He had no intention of not
including Judith in his victory.
“Of course; but Judith’s a young lady who is eminently capable of
fighting her own battles,” Mrs. Sellars smoothly rejoined.
“She ought to be—she’s had to fight everybody else’s.”
He leaned his head against the back of his armchair, and wondered what
had become of the glow with which he had entered the room. It had
vanished instantly under the cool touch of Mrs. Sellars’s allusion to
Judith. He had succeeded, it was true: there could be no doubt that he
had succeeded. The mere fact of gaining time was nine tenths of the
battle; and that he had already achieved. But already, too, he was
beginning to wonder how he was to fit Rose Sellars into the picture of
his success. It was curious: when they were apart it was always her
courage and her ardour that he felt; as soon as they came together again
she seemed hemmed in by little restrictions and inhibitions.
“Do tell me just what happened,” she said.
“Well—at the very last minute they decided to make me, informally, into
the children’s guardian: a sort of trial-guardian, you might call it.”
“A trial-guardian?” Her intonation, and the laugh that followed it,
lifted the term into the region of the absurd. “What a jolly thing to be
a trial-guardian!”
“Well, I’m not so sure.” Boyne faced her irritably. “It’s not a joke,
you know.”
“I shan’t know what it is till you explain.”
Explain—explain! Yes; he knew now that the explaining was just what he
was dodging away from. To Judith and Terry no explanations would be
necessary. He would only have to say: “It’s all right,” and be smothered
in hugs and jubilations. Those two would never think of asking for
reasons—life had not accustomed them to expect any. But here sat lovely
Logic, her long hands clasped attentively—
“Oh, by Jove!” Boyne exclaimed, clapping his own hands first on one
pocket, then on another. “Here’s something I got for you in Venice.”
He drew forth a small parcel, stringless and shapeless, as parcels
generally seemed to be when they emerged from his pockets, unwrapped the
paper, and pressed the catch of a morocco box. The lid flew open, and
revealed a curious crystal pendant in a network of worn enamel.
“Oh, the lovely thing! For me?”
“Oh, no; not that,” he stammered. He jerked the trinket back, wrapped
the box up, and pushed it into his pocket with the exasperated sense of
blushing like a boy over his blunder.
“But, Martin—”
“Here—.” He delved deeper, pulled out another parcel, in wrappings
equally untidy, and took up one of the long hands lying on her knee.
“This is for you.” He slipped on her fourth finger a sapphire set in
diamonds. She lowered her lids on it in gentle admiration. “It’s much
too beautiful,” her lips protested. Then her mockery sparkled up at him.
“Only, you’ve put it on the wrong hand—at least, if it’s meant for our
engagement.”
“Looks as if it were, doesn’t it?” he bantered back; but inwardly he was
thinking: “Yes, that’s just the trouble—it looks like the engagement
ring any other fellow would have given to any other woman. Nothing in
the world to do with her and me.” Aloud he said: “I hadn’t time to find
what I wanted—” and then realised that this was hardly a way of
bettering his case. “I wanted something so awfully different for you,”
he blundered on.
“Well, your wanting that makes it different—to me,” she said; and added,
more tepidly: “Besides, it’s lovely.” She held out her left hand, and he
slipped the jewel on the proper finger. “It’s rotten,” he grumbled. The
ring had cost him more than he could afford, it had failed to please
her, he saw himself that it was utterly commonplace—and saw also that
she would never forgive him for pocketing the trinket he had first
produced, which was nothing in itself, but had struck her fancy as soon
as she knew it was not meant for her. Should he pull it out again, and
ask her to accept it? No; after what had passed that was impossible.
Judith Wheater, if he had been trying an engagement ring on her finger
(preposterous fancy!) would have blurted out at once that she preferred
the trinket he had shoved back into his pocket. But such tactlessness
was unthinkable in Mrs. Sellars. Not for the world, he knew, would she
have let him guess that she had given the other ornament a thought.
She sat turning her hand from side to side and diligently admiring the
ring. “And now—do tell me just what happened.”
“Well—first, of course, a lot of talk.”
He settled himself in his chair, and tried to take up the narrative. But
wherever he grasped it, the awkward thing seemed to tumble out of his
hold, as if, in that respect too, he were always taking the wrong parcel
out of his pocket. To begin with, it was so difficult to explain to Mrs.
Sellars that, after the Wheaters had been reassured as to the safety and
wellbeing of the children, the negotiations had been carried on
piecemeal, desultorily, parenthetically, between swims and sun-baths,
cocktails and foxtrots, poker and baccara—and, as a rule, in the
presence of all the conflicting interests.
To make Mrs. Sellars understand that Lady Wrench, her husband and Gerald
Ormerod had assisted at the debates as a matter of course was in itself
a laborious business; to convey to her that Mrs. Lullmer—still notorious
as the former Mrs. Westway—had likewise been called upon to participate,
as Joyce’s possible successor, was to place too heavy a strain on her
imagination. Her exquisite aloofness had kept her in genuine ignorance
of the compromises and promiscuities of modern life, and left on her
hands the picture of a vanished world wherein you didn’t speak to people
who were discredited, or admit rivals or enemies to your confidence; and
she punctuated Boyne’s narrative with murmurs of dismay and incredulity.
“But in that crowd,” Boyne explained, “no man is another man’s enemy for
more than a few minutes, and no woman is any other woman’s rival. Either
they forget they’ve quarrelled, or some social necessity—usually a party
that none of them can bear to miss—forces them together, and makes it
easier to bury their differences. But generally it’s a simple case of
forgetting. Their memories are as short as a savage’s, and the feuds
that savages remember have dropped out. They recall only the other
primitive needs—food, finery, dancing. I suppose we _are_ relapsing into
a kind of bloodless savagery,” Boyne concluded.
Besides, he went on, in the Wheater set they could deal with things only
collectively; alone, they became helpless and inarticulate. They lived
so perpetually in the lime-light that they required an audience—an
audience made up of their own kind. Before each other they shouted and
struck attitudes; again like savages. But the chief point was that
nobody could stay angry—not however much they tried. It was too much
trouble, and might involve too many inconveniences, interfere with too
many social arrangements. When all was said and done, all they asked was
not to be bothered—and it was by gambling on that requirement that he
had finally gained his point.
“And your point is, exactly—”
Well, as he got closer to it, Boyne was not even sure that it could be
defined as a point. It was too shapeless and undecided; but he hoped it
would serve for a time—and time was everything; especially for Terry....
“They’ve agreed to leave the children together, and to leave them here,
for the next three or four months. The longest to bring round was Lady
Wrench. Her husband has taken a fancy to Zinnie, and he’s so mortally
bored by life in general that his wife clutches at anything that may
amuse him. Luckily, according to the terms of the divorce—”
“Which divorce?” Mrs. Sellars interpolated, as though genuinely anxious
to keep her hand on all the clues.
“Wheater _versus_ Zinnia Lacrosse. It was Wheater who got the divorce
from the present Lady Wrench. Legally he has the final say about Zinnie,
so the mother had to give in, though she has a right to see the child at
stated intervals. But of course my battle royal was over Chipstone; if
the Wheaters had insisted on keeping Chipstone till their own affairs
were settled in court the whole combination would have been broken up.”
“And how did you contrive to rescue Chipstone?”
Boyne sank down more deeply into his armchair, and looked up at the low
ceiling. Then he straightened himself, and brought his gaze to the level
of Mrs. Sellars’s. “By promising to stay here and keep an eye on the
children myself. That’s my trial-guardianship.” He gave a slight laugh,
which she failed to echo.
“Martin!”
His eyes continued to challenge hers. “Well—?”
She turned the sapphire hesitatingly on her finger. “But these
children—you’d never even heard of them till you met them on board your
steamer a few weeks ago....”
“No; that’s true.”
“You’ve taken over a pretty big responsibility.”
“I like responsibilities.”
Mrs. Sellars was still brooding over her newly imprisoned finger. “It’s
very generous of you to assume this one in such a hurry. Usually one
doesn’t have to go out of one’s way to find rather more of them than one
can manage. But in this case, I wonder—”
“You wonder?”
“Well, I had understood from Terry—and also from your friend Judith—that
what all the children really want is to go to America: to Mrs. Wheater’s
mother, isn’t it?”
“Yes; that’s it; and I hope they’ll pull it off by-and-by. But at
present the Wheaters won’t hear of it. I never for a moment supposed
they’d consent to putting the ocean between themselves and Chip. My only
chance was to persuade them that, now Terry’s in the mountains, they’d
better leave him here, and the others with him, till the hot weather’s
over. With those people it’s always a question of the least
resistance—of temporizing and postponing. My plan saved everybody a
certain amount of mental effort; so they all ended by agreeing to it.
But of course it’s merely provisional.”
“Happily,” Mrs. Sellars smiled; and added, as if to correct the slight
acerbity of the comment: “For you must see, dear, that you’re taking a
considerable risk for the future—”
“What future?”
“Why—suppose anything goes wrong during these next few months? You’ll be
answerable for whatever may happen. With seven children—and one of them
already grown up!”
Boyne frowned, and stirred uneasily in his chair. “If you mean Judith,
in some ways she’s as much of a child as the youngest of them.”
Mrs. Sellars smiled confidentially at her ring. “So a man would think, I
suppose. But you forget that I’ve had four days alone with her.... She’s
a young lady with very definite views.”
“I should hope so!”
“I agree with you that it makes her more interesting—but conceivably it
might lead to complications.”
“What sort of complications?”
“You ought to know better than I do—since you tell me you’ve been
frequenting the late Mrs. Westway at the Lido. Judith doesn’t pretend to
hide the fact that she lived for a summer in the bosom of that edifying
family....”
“She doesn’t know it’s anything to hide. That’s what’s so touching—”
“And so terrifying. But I won’t sit here preaching prudence; you’d only
hate me for it. And all this time those poor infants are waiting.” She
stood up with one of her sudden changes of look and tone; as if a cloud
had parted, shedding a ray of her lost youth on her. He noticed for the
first time that she was all in white, a rose on her breast, and a shady
hat hanging from her arm. “Do go down and see them at once, dear. It’s
getting late. I’ll walk with you to the foot of the hill; then I must
come back and write some letters....” He smiled at the familiar formula,
and she took up his smile. “Yes; really important letters—one of them to
Aunt Julia,” she bantered back. “And besides, the children will want to
have you all to themselves.” Magnanimously she added: “I must say they
all behaved beautifully while you were away. They seemed to feel that
they must do you credit. And as for Terry—I wish he were mine! When the
break up comes, as of course it will, why shouldn’t you and I adopt
him?”
She put on her hat, and linked her arm in Boyne’s for the walk down the
hill; but at the fringe of the wood, where the path dipped to the high
road, she left him.
“You’ll come back and dine? I’ve got some news for you too,” she said as
he turned down to the village.
XVIII
Recent memories of Armistice Day—remote ones of Mafeking Night, which he
had chanced to experience in London—paled for Boyne in the uproar raised
by the little Wheaters when, entering their pension dining-room, he told
them that everything was all right.
He had not imagined that seven could be so many. The miracle of the
loaves and fishes seemed as nothing to the sudden multiplication of
arms, legs and lungs about that rural supper-table. At one end of the
expanse of coarse linen and stout crockery, Miss Scope, rigid and
spectacled, sat dispensing jam without fear or favour; at the other
Judith was cutting bread and butter in complete unawareness of her
immortal model. Between the two surged a sea of small heads, dusky,
ruddy, silver-pale, all tossing and mixing about the golden crest of
Chipstone, throned in his umpire’s chair. For a moment, as usual, Bun
and Zinnie dominated the scene; then Terry, still pale, but with new
life in his eyes, caught his cap from the rack with a call for three
cheers to which the others improvised a piercing echo. (“Luckily we’re
the only boarders just now,” Miss Scope remarked to Boyne as he pressed
her hand.)
In this wonderful world nobody asked any questions; nobody seemed to
care for any particulars; their one thought was to bestow on their
ambassador the readiest token of their gratitude, from Blanca’s cool
kiss to the damp and strangulating endearments of Beechy. To Boyne it
was literally like a dip into a quick sea, with waves that burnt his
eyes, choked his throat and ears, but stung him, body and brain, to
fresh activity. “And now let’s kiss him all over again—and it’s my turn
first!” Zinnie rapturously proposed; and as he abandoned himself once
more to the battering of the breakers he caught a small voice piping:
“We suppose you’ve brought some presents for us, Martin.”
The law which makes men progressively repeople the world with persons of
their own age and experience had led Boyne, as he grew older, to regard
human relations as more and more ruled by reason; but whenever he dipped
into the universe of the infant Wheaters, where all perspective ceased,
and it was far more urgent to know what presents he had brought than
what fate had been meted out to them by their respective parents, he
felt the joy of plunging back into reality.
The presents were there, and nobody had been forgotten, as the rapid
unpacking of a small suit-case showed—nobody, that is, but Judith, who
stood slightly apart, affecting an air of grown-up amusement, while
Blanca and the little girls were hung with trinkets, and Bun made
jubilant by an electric lamp. Even Miss Scope had an appropriate
reticule, Nanny a lavishly garnished needle-case; and the bottom of the
box was crammed with books for Terry.
The distributing took so long, and the ensuing disputes and
counter-claims were so difficult of adjustment, that twilight was
slipping down the valley when Boyne said to Judith: “Come and take a
turn, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
They walked along the road to a path which led up the hillside opposite
to the hotels, and from there began to mount slowly toward the receding
sunlight. Judith, unasked, had slipped her arm through Boyne’s, and the
nearness of her light young body was like wings to him. “What a pity
it’s getting dark—I believe I could climb to one of those ruby peaks!”
he said, throwing his head back with a deep breath; and she instantly
rejoined: “Let’s run back and get Bun’s lamp; then we could.”
Boyne laughed, and went on, in a voice of leisurely satisfaction: “Oh,
Bun wouldn’t part with that lamp—not yet. Besides, we’re very well as we
are; and there’ll be lots of other opportunities.”
“There will? Oh, Martin—they’re really going to let us stay?” Her strong
young hands imprisoned him in a passionate grasp.
“Well, for a time. I made them see it was Terry’s best chance.”
“Of course it is! And, Martin—they’ll leave us all together? Chip and
all?”
“Every man of you—for the summer, at any rate.” They had stopped in the
fern-fringed path, and he stood above her, smiling down into her
blissful incredulous eyes. “There’s one condition, though—” Her gaze
darkened, and he added: “You’re all to be accountable to me. I’ve
promised your people to keep an eye on you.”
“You mean you’re going to stay here with us?” Her lips trembled with the
tears she was struggling to keep back, and he thought to himself: “It’s
too much for a child’s face to express—.” Aloud he said: “Let’s sit down
and watch the sunset. This tree-trunk is a pretty good proscenium box.”
They sat down, and he set forth at length the history of his
negotiations. Complicated as the narrative was, it was easier to relate
to his present hearer than to Mrs. Sellars, not only because fewer
elucidations were necessary, but because none of the details he gave
shocked or astonished Judith. The tale he told evidently seemed to her a
mere bald statement of a matter-of-course affair, and she was too much
occupied with its practical results to give a thought to its remoter
bearings. She listened attentively to Boyne’s report of the final
agreement, and when he had ended, said only: “I suppose father’s made
some arrangement about paying our bills?”
“Your father’s opened an account for me: Miss Scope and I are to be your
ministers of finance.”
She received this in silence; for the first time since his return he
felt that the news he brought was still overshadowed for her. At last
she asked: “Was father awfully angry ... you know ... about that money?”
The question roused Boyne with a start. He perceived that in his
struggle to adjust conflicting interests he too had lost sight of the
moral issue. And how confess to Judith that, as for her father, he had
hardly been aware of it? He felt that it was a moment for prevarication.
“Of course your father was angry—thoroughly angry—about the whole thing.
Anybody would have been.”
She lowered her voice to insist: “But I mean about my taking his money?”
“Well, he’s forgiven you for that, at any rate.”
“Has he—really and truly?” Her voice lifted again joyfully. “Terry was
sure he never would.”
Boyne turned about on her in surprise. “Terry—then you told him after
all?”
She made a mute sign of assent. “I had to.”
“Well, I understand that.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I’m glad
you did.”
“He was frightfully upset, you know. And furious with me. I was afraid
I’d made him more ill. He wouldn’t believe me at first. He said if I had
no more moral sense than that, the first thing I knew I’d land in
prison.”
“Oh—.” Boyne could not restrain a faint laugh.
“That didn’t worry me very much, though,” Judith confessed in a more
cheerful tone, “because I’ve seen a good deal more of life than Terry,
and I’ve known other girls who’ve done what I did, and none of them ever
went to prison.”
This did not seem as reassuring to Boyne as it did to the speaker; but
the hour for severity was over, the words of rebuke died on his lips. At
last he said: “The worst of it was hurting Terry, wasn’t it?” and she
nodded: “Yes.”
For a while after that they sat without speaking, till she asked him if
he thought the Wheaters had already started divorce proceedings. To this
he could only answer that it looked so, but he still hoped they might
calm down and think better of it. She received this with a gesture of
incredulity, and merely remarked: “There might have been a chance if Syb
Lullmer hadn’t been mixed up in it.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t call that woman by her Christian name,” Boyne
interrupted.
Judith looked at him with a gentle wonder. “She wouldn’t mind. Everybody
else does.” She clearly assumed that he was reproving her for failing in
respect to Mrs. Lullmer.
“That’s not what I meant. But she’s such a beast.”
“Oh, well—.” Judith’s shrug implied that the epithet was too familiar to
her to have kept more than a tinge of obloquy. “I rather hope she won’t
marry father, though.”
“I hope to God she won’t. What I’m gambling on is that he and your
mother will get so homesick for you children that they’ll patch things
up on your account.”
Her smile kept its soft incredulity. “They don’t often, you know;
parents don’t.”
“Well, anyhow, you’ve got a reprieve, and you must make the most of it.”
“I wish you’d say ‘we,’ not ‘you,’ Martin.”
“Why of course it’s ‘we,’ my dear—that is, as long as you all behave
yourselves.”
They both laughed at this, and then fell silent, facing the sunset, and
immersed, in their different ways, in the overwhelming glory of the
spectacle. Judith, Boyne knew, did not feel sunsets as Rose Sellars
did—they appealed to a different order of associations, and she would
probably have been put to it to distinguish the quality of their
splendour from that of fireworks at the Lido, or a brilliant _finale_ at
the Russian ballet. But something of the celestial radiance seemed to
reach her, remote yet enfolding as a guardian wing. “It’s lovely here,”
she breathed, her hand in Boyne’s.
He remembered, at a similar moment, Rose Sellars’s quoting:
_All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;
Clouds overcome it;
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel’s
Circling its summit—_
and he murmured the words half aloud.
Judith’s pressure tightened ardently on his hand. “Oh, Martin, how
beautifully you do describe things! The words you find are not like
anybody else’s. Terry says you ought to be a writer.”
“Well, in this case, unluckily, somebody found the words before me.”
“Oh—.” Her enthusiasm flagged. She hazarded: “Mrs. Sellars?”
He gave a little chuckle at her sharpness. “In a way, yes—but, as a
matter of fact, Robert Browning got ahead of both of us.”
This seemed to give her a certain satisfaction. “Then she just cribbed
it from him? Is he another friend of hers?”
“Yes; and will be of yours some day, I hope. He died long before you
were born; but you’ll find some of the best of him in one of the books I
brought to Terry.”
“Oh, he’s just an author, you mean,” she murmured, as if the state were
a strictly posthumous one. Her attention always had a tendency to wander
at the mention of books, and he thought she was probably a little vexed
at having been betrayed into a conversational slip; but presently, with
a return of her habitual buoyancy: “I’d rather hear you talk than
anybody who’s dead,” she declared.
“All right; I’ll make it a rule to give you only my own vintage,” he
agreed, gazing out past her into the light. They continued to sit there
in silence, the sea of night creeping softly up to them, till at length
they were caught in its chill touch. Boyne got reluctantly to his feet.
“Come along, child. Time to go down,” he said.
“Oh, not down yet—up, up, up!” She caught his arm again, pulling him
with all her young strength along the pine-scented steep to where the
mystery of the forest drew down to meet them. “I want to climb and
climb—don’t you? I want to stay up all night, as if we were coming home
at sunrise from a ball. It’s like a great ballroom over there, isn’t
it,” she cried, pointing to the west, “with the lights pouring out of a
million windows?”
Boyne laughed, and suffered himself to be led onward. The air on that
height was as fresh as youth, and all about them were the secret scents
that dew and twilight waken into life. He knew that he and Judith ought
to be turning homeward; but, even if she had released his captive arm,
it was growing too dark to consult his watch. Besides, the wandering man
in him, the man used to mountains, to long lonely tramps, to the hush
and mystery of nights in the open, felt himself in the toils of the old
magic. It was no longer Judith drawing him on, but the night itself
beckoning him to fresh heights. The child at his side had travelled with
him into the beauty as far as she could go, and now he needed nothing
from her but the warmth of her nearness. His highest moments had always
been solitary....
She seemed to guess that there was nothing else to say, and they
continued to mount the hill in silence. As they rose the air turned
colder, the fires faded, and above them arched a steel-blue heaven
starred with ruddy points which grew keen and white as darkness
deepened. It was not till they passed out of the fringes of the forest
to an open crag above the valley, and saw the village lights sprinkling
the black fields far below, that Boyne unwillingly woke to the sense of
time and place.
“Oh, by Jove—you must come!” he exclaimed, swinging round to guide his
companion down the ledge.
She made no answer, but turned and followed him along the descending
path. He could feel that she was too tired and peaceful for reluctance.
She moved beside him like a sleepy child bringing back an apronful of
flowers from a happy holiday; and the fact of having reassured her so
quickly awed Boyne a little, as if he had meddled with destiny. But it
was pleasant, for once, to play the god, and he let himself drift away
into visions of a vague millennium where all the grown people knew what
they wanted, and if ever it happened that they didn’t, the children had
the casting vote.
By the time they reached the _pension_, and Judith had loosed her hold
of Boyne’s arm, he was afraid to look at his watch, but pushed her
through the gate with a quick goodnight—and then, a moment later, called
to her in an imperious whisper. “Judith!” She hurried back to the
summons.
“Did you really think I hadn’t brought you any present?”
She gave an excited little laugh. “N—no; I really thought perhaps you
had; only—”
“Only what?”
“I thought you’d forgotten some one else’s, and had imagined I shouldn’t
much mind your taking mine, because I’m so much older than the
others....”
“Well, of course I should have imagined that; but here it is.”
He pulled out the parcel he had inadvertently produced in Mrs. Sellars’s
sitting-room, and Judith caught it to her with a gasp of pleasure.
“Oh, Martin—”
“There; own up that you’d have been fearfully sold if I’d forgotten
you.”
She answered solemnly: “If you’d forgotten me I should have died of it.”
“Well—run off with you; we’re hours late,” he admonished her.
“Mayn’t I look at it before you go?”
“You baby, how could you see in the dark? Besides, I tell you there’s no
time.”
“Not even time to kiss you for it, Martin?”
“No,” he cried, slamming the gate shut, and starting up the hill toward
his hotel at a run.
When they started on their walk nothing had been farther from Boyne’s
mind than this disposal of the crystal pendant, though it was for Judith
that the trinket had been chosen. Since Mrs. Sellars, owing to his
blunder, had seen and coveted it, he felt a certain awkwardness about
letting it appear on Judith’s neck, and decided that his little friend
must again be left out in the general distribution of presents. But
during their walk in the mountain dusk, while she hung on his arm,
pressed close by the intruding fir-branches, he needed more and more to
think of her as a child, and, thinking thus, to treat her as one. He
knew how the child in her must have ached at being left out when he
unpacked his gifts; and when the time came to say goodnight it was
irresistible to heal that ache. There was no way of doing it but to take
the pendant from his pocket—the pendant which he had meant for her, and
which it had taken so long to unearth at the Venetian antiquary’s that
there was no time for much thought of Mrs. Sellars’s—the pendant which
was Judith’s by right because, like her, it was odd and exquisite and
unaccountable.
“If only she doesn’t parade it up at the _châlet_!” the coward in him
thought, as he climbed the hill. But all the while he knew it was
exactly what she would do.
“Oh, well, damn—after all, I chose it for her,” he grumbled, as if that
justified them both.
In the _châlet_ sitting-room Mrs. Sellars, in her cool evening dress,
looked up from the table at which she sat, not writing a letter but
reading one. She laid it down thoughtfully as he entered.
“I’m afraid it’s awfully late—I hadn’t time to go to the hotel and brush
up; you don’t mind?” he said, blinking a little in the lamplight, and
passing his hand through his rumpled hair. As he bent to kiss her his
glance fell on the admonishing needles of the little travelling clock at
her elbow. “You don’t mean to say it’s after nine?”
“What does it matter? As a matter of fact, it’s after half-past. I was
only afraid something had gone wrong about the children.”
He tossed his hat down with a laugh. “Bless you, no! Everything’s as
right as right. But I had to get the Lido out of my lungs; and a long
tramp was the only way.”
Her smile told him how much she loved him for hating the Lido. “And what
do you think my news is? You know I said I had something to tell you.
Mr. Dobree is coming here to see me—he arrives next week.” She announced
the fact as if it were not only important, but even exciting.
“Oh, damn Mr. Dobree!” Boyne rejoined with a careless benevolence. The
door had opened on the candlelight of their little dinner-table, on its
sparkle of white wine and smell of wild strawberries and village bread.
“Well, this is good enough for me,” Boyne said, as he dropped into the
seat opposite Mrs. Sellars with a sense of proprietorship which made Mr.
Dobree’s movements seem wholly negligible.
XIX
The next day there occurred, with a fatal punctuality, exactly what
Boyne had foreseen. Mrs. Sellars had invited Judith, Terry and Blanca to
lunch; and when they appeared Mrs. Sellars’s eye instantly lit on the
crystal pendant, Judith’s on the sapphire ring. The mutual
reconnaissance was swift and silent as the crossing of search-lights in
a night sky. Judith said nothing; but Blanca, as Mrs. Sellars bent to
kiss her, raised her hostess’s hand with an admiring exclamation. “A new
ring! What a beauty! I never saw you wear it before.”
Mrs. Sellars smiled, and tapped Blanca’s cheek with her free hand. “What
sharp eyes! But everybody seems to have had a present from Venice—so why
shouldn’t I?”
Blanca returned the smile, lifting her own wrist to display a hoop of
pink crystal. “Isn’t mine sweet? Nobody finds presents like Martin.”
“So I thought when he showed me Judith’s last night.”
Mrs. Sellars turned to the older girl, but not to kiss her. She reserved
her endearments for the younger children, and merely laid a friendly
touch on Judith’s shoulder. “Such a wonder, that pendant—I never saw one
like it. Decidedly, not Venetian; seventeenth century Spanish, perhaps?
It’s a puzzle. You’re lucky, my dear, to have a _connaisseur_ to choose
your presents.”
That was all—and then a jolly lunch, simple, easy, full of chaff and
laughter, Mrs. Sellars, always a perfect hostess, was at her best with
Terry and Blanca. The boy touched and interested her, the little girl
(Boyne divined) subtly flattered her by a wide-eyed but tactful
admiration. Boyne wondered if Mrs. Sellars had noticed how Blanca’s
clear gray eyes darkened with envy at the praise of the crystal pendant.
What a fool he had been not to give the crystal to Blanca, and the
tuppenny bracelet to Judith, who would have liked it best because it
came from him! Decidedly, he was doomed to blunder in his dealings with
women, even when they were no more than little girls. Meanwhile Terry
was telling Mrs. Sellars about the books Boyne had brought him, and how
he and Judith had already hunted down Boyne’s quotation from “The
Grammarian’s Funeral”—“You know, that splendid one he told Judith
yesterday, about ‘all the peaks soar’; she came home last night saying
it over and over for fear she’d forget it, and woke me up to hunt for it
before she went to bed.”
“It was so splendid, hearing it up there on the mountain, in the dark,
with the stars coming out,” Judith glowed, taking up the tale, while
Blanca ingenuously added: “It was so late when Judy got home that we
were all asleep, and Scopy had to go down and let her in. Did you see
Scopy in her crimping-pins, Martin; or had you gone when she opened the
door?”
“Yes—the coming of twilight up on the heights is something to remember,”
Mrs. Sellars intervened, letting her eyes rest attentively on Boyne’s
before she turned them again to Terry. “But there are better things than
that in Browning, you know. Bring me your book to-morrow, and I’ll show
you....”
It all went off perfectly—and Boyne, when he started the children
homeward after lunch, was wondering whether tact were as soothing as a
summer breeze, or as terrible as an army with banners.
He was to drop the young Wheaters at their _pension_, and afterward meet
Mrs. Sellars at the post-office for a climb in the direction of
Misurina. At the corner of the highroad descending to Cortina he
signalled the hotel omnibus, packed in the twins, and walked on with
Judith. At the moment he would rather have escaped from the whole party;
but Judith had declared her intention of walking, and he could not do
otherwise than go with her. They waited under the trees for the omnibus
to sweep on with its load of dust and passengers, and almost at once
Judith said: “I suppose you’re engaged to Mrs. Sellars, aren’t you,
Martin?”
The suddenness of the question struck him like a blow, and he realised
for the first time that he had never spoken to Rose Sellars about making
their engagement known. He had never even asked her if she had broken
the news to her formidable aunt, or to the galaxy of minor relatives
with whom she maintained her incessant exchange of letters. Her
insistence that their marriage should be put off for nearly half a year
seemed to make the whole question too remote for immediate decisions. “I
suppose I ought to have asked her if she wanted it announced,” he
thought, reflecting remorsefully that his long exile had made him too
careless of the social observances. He turned an irritated eye on
Judith. “What in the world put such an idea into your head?”
“Why, your bringing her a ring from Venice, and her putting it on the
finger where engagement rings are worn,” Judith replied with a smiling
promptness.
“Oh, that’s the finger, is it?” Boyne said, temporising; and then, with
an abrupt clutch at simplification; “Yes; I am engaged to Mrs. Sellars.
But I don’t think she wants it spoken of at present.”
He turned his gaze away to the long white road glinting through the
trees under which he and Judith were withdrawn. Things happened so
suddenly and overwhelmingly in Judith’s face that he did not feel equal
to what might be going on there till he had steadied his gaze by a
protracted study of the landscape. When he looked at her again he
received the shock of smiling lips and eyes, and two arms thrown
filially about him.
“You darling old Martin, I’m so glad! At least I am if you are—really
and truly?”
Her hug was almost as suffocating as Zinnie’s, and given—he divined it
instantly—with the same wholehearted candour. “So Blanca was right after
all! How lovely it must be to be in love! For I suppose that’s the
reason why you’re marrying? I know you’re awfully romantic, though you
sometimes put on such a gruff manner; I’m sure you wouldn’t marry just
for position, or for money, or to regularise an old _liaison_; would
you?”
“An old _liaison_?” Boyne laughed, but with a touch of vexation. “The
ideas you’ve picked up—and the lingo! You absurd child—why, ‘regularise’
isn’t even English.... And can’t you see, can’t you imagine, that a
man’s first need is to—to respect the woman he hopes to marry?”
Judith received this with a puzzled frown. “Oh, I can see it; I have,
often—in books, and at the movies. But I can’t imagine it, exactly. I
should have thought wanting to give her a good hug came before
anything.”
Boyne shrugged impatiently. Things that seemed funny, and utterly
guileless, when she said them to others, shocked him when she commented
on his private concerns in the vocabulary of her tribe. “What’s the use?
You’re only a baby, and you repeat things like a parrot, as all children
do. Mrs. Sellars is the most perfect, the most exquisite...” He broke
off, feeling that such asseverations led nowhere in particular, and
continued at a tangent: “I can tell you one thing—I should never have
dared to take on the job of looking after you children if she hadn’t
been here—”
Judith’s face fell. “Oh, is she going to stay all summer, then?”
“I devoutly hope so! Being with somebody like her is so exactly what...”
This, again, seemed to land him in a sort of rhetorical blind alley, and
he stepped down from it into the dust of the highroad. “Come along; we
mustn’t dawdle. I’m due at the post-office.” He was aware that a settled
anger was possessing him, he hardly knew why. Hardly—yet just under the
surface of his mind there stirred the uneasy sense that he was perhaps
disappointed by Judith’s prompt congratulations. Half an hour earlier,
he would have said that her approval would add the final touch to his
happiness; that there was nothing he wanted more than to have her show
herself in fact the child he was perpetually calling her. “The youngest
of them all”—that was how he had described her to Mrs. Sellars. Was it
possible he had not meant what he said?
He was roused by Judith’s squeeze on his arm. “I don’t know why you’re
so cross with me, old Martin. I do really want anything you want....”
“That’s a good Judy ... and what rot, dear, thinking I’m cross. Only,
remember, it’s your secret and mine, and not another soul’s.” After all,
he tried to tell himself, Judith’s knowing of his engagement was already
a relief. It would do away with no end of hedging and prevaricating. And
he was sure he could trust to Judith’s discretion; sure of it without
her added pressure on his arm, and the solemn: “On Scopy’s book!” which
had become the tribal oath of the little Wheaters. Boyne had sometimes
winced at Judith’s precocious discretion, as another proof of what she
had been exposed to; now he hailed in it a guaranty of peace. “Perhaps
there’s something to be said for not keeping children in cotton wool—for
she _is_ only a child!” he repeated to himself, insistently.
That very evening, while he and Mrs. Sellars were talking over the
likelihood of picking up some kind of a tutor for Terry, she asked
irrelevantly: “By the way, do the children know of our engagement?”
Contradictory answers rose to Boyne’s lips, and he gulped them down to
mumble: “I didn’t suppose I was authorized to tell anybody.”
“But hasn’t anybody guessed?”
“Well—as a matter of fact, Judith has. Today. I can’t imagine—”
Mrs. Sellars smiled. “My ring, of course. Trust Blanca, too! It was
stupid of me not to think of it. But perhaps it’s better—”
“Much better.”
She pondered. “Only I’d rather no one else knew—at least for the
present. Out of regard for Aunt Julia—till I’ve heard from her.” Boyne,
relieved, expressed his complete agreement. “Besides,” she continued, “I
like it’s being our secret, don’t you? We won’t even tell Mr. Dobree.”
“Oh, particularly not Mr. Dobree,” Boyne replied emphatically.
Two days later Mr. Dobree arrived; and Boyne learned that an event which
seems negligible before it happens may fill the picture when it becomes
a fact. The prospect of Mr. Dobree’s arrival had now become the fact of
Mr. Dobree’s presence; and Mr. Dobree, though still spare and nimble for
a man approaching sixty (he was ready, and glad, to tell you to what
exercises he owed it), took up a surprising amount of room. He was like
somebody who travels with a lot of unwieldy luggage—his luggage being,
as it were, the very absence of it, being his tact, his
self-effacingness, his general neatness and compactness. Wherever you
turned, you were in the aura of Mr. Dobree’s retractility, his earnest
and insistent dodging out of your way, which seemed to leave behind it a
presence more oppressive than any mere physical bulk—so that a dull fat
man rooted in your best armchair might have been less in the way than
the slim and disappearing Mr. Dobree. Mr. Dobree’s tact seemed to Boyne
like a parody of Mrs. Sellars’s; like one of those monstrous blooms into
which hybridizers transform a delicate flower. It was a “show” tact, a
huge, unique, disbudded tact grown under glass, and destined to be
labelled, exhibited, given a prize and a name, and a page to itself in
the florists’ catalogues. Such at least was Boyne’s distorted vision of
the new guest at the _châlet_.
Mr. Dobree (as became a man with such impedimenta) was lodged, not at
Boyne’s inn, but at the “Palace” where Boyne and Mrs. Sellars had once
dined. From there a brisk five minutes carried him to the _châlet_;
except when his urgent hospitality drew Mrs. Sellars and Boyne to the
big hotel. The prompt returning of invitations was a fundamental part of
Mr. Dobree’s code. He seemed to think that hospitality was something a
gentleman might borrow, like money, but never, in any circumstances,
receive as a gift; and this obliged Mrs. Sellars to accept his repeated
invitations, before, in the battle of their tacts, hers came off
victorious, and she made him see that it may be more blessed to receive
than to be invited out. The sapphire had vanished from her finger before
Mr. Dobree’s arrival; and this precaution, for which Boyne blessed her,
made him, for Mr. Dobree, simply an old friend, a guest of the Sellars’s
in New York days, whom one could be suitably pleased to meet again.
Boyne was less pleased to meet Mr. Dobree. His coming was natural
enough; and so was Mrs. Sellars’s pleasure at seeing him, since he
brought not only the latest news of Aunt Julia but papers which settled
satisfactorily the matter of Mr. Sellars’s will. Boyne had resented what
promised to be a tiresome interruption of pleasant habits; but before
long he discovered that Mr. Dobree’s presence left him free to spend
much more time with his young friends of the _Pension Rosenglüh_. This
made him aware that during the last weeks he had forfeited a certain
amount of his liberty, and he found himself perilously pleased to
recover it. He assured Mrs. Sellars that it would look very odd to Mr.
Dobree, who had come to discuss family matters with his client, if a
third person were present at these discussions; and armed with this
argument he proceeded to dispose of his time as he pleased.
His liberation gave a new savour to the hours spent with the little
Wheaters; and as for Mr. Dobree (with whom the children had had only one
brief and awe-inspiring encounter), he came in very handily as the theme
of the games they were always calling on Boyne to invent. To ascertain
Mr. Dobree’s Christian name (Boyne told them) had long been his secret
ambition; but hitherto he had not even been able to learn its first
letter. A chance glimpse of Mr. Dobree’s glossy suit-cases showed his
initials to be A.D., and the letter A was one calculated, as Boyne said,
to give them a good gallop. Indeed, he found the puzzle so absorbing
that one day, when Judith remarked on his unusual absent-mindedness, he
had to own that he had not been listening to what she said because all
his faculties were still absorbed in the task of guessing Mr. Dobree’s
Christian name.
“But Mrs. Sellars must know—why don’t you ask her?”
“Must know? Do you think so? I doubt it.”
“But she talks of him as an old friend—as old as you.”
“Even that doesn’t convince me. I doubt if anybody knows Mr. Dobree’s
Christian name. How should they? Can you imagine anybody’s ever having
called him by it, or dared to ask him what it was?”
“Well, you might ask her,” suggested Judith, from whose make-up a taste
for abstract speculation was absent.
“Ask her? Not for the world! Suppose she did know? All our fun would be
over.”
“Of course it would,” cried Terry, plunging into the sport. “If she
knows, she mustn’t be asked till we’ve exhausted every other
possibility; must she, Martin?”
“Certainly not. I see you grasp the rules of the game. And now let’s
proceed by elimination. Abel—Abel’s the first name in A, isn’t it,
Terry?”
“No! There’s a Prince Aage of Denmark, or something; I saw him in ‘The
Tatler,’” exulted Terry.
“All right. Let’s begin with Aage. Do any of you _see_ Mr. Dobree as
Aage?” This was dismissed with a general shout of incredulity.
“Well, then: as Abel—Abel Dobree? Don’t be in a hurry: try to deal with
this thing in a mood of deliberateness and impartiality.”
“No, no, no—not Abel!” the assistance chorused.
“Oh, I’m going to sleep,” Judith grumbled, stretching out at full length
on the sunburnt grass-bank on which the party were encamped.
“Let her—for all the use she is!” Boyne jeered. “Now then—Adam?”
“Adam’s a Polish name, isn’t it? Who _was_ Adam?” Judith opened her eyes
to ask.
“A national hero, I think,” said Blanca, with a diligent frown.
Miss Scope, perched higher up the bank, cut through these conjectures
with a groan. “Children—children! One would think I’d brought you up
like savages. Adam—”
“Oh, Scopy means the Adam in the Bible: but Mr. Dobree’s parents
wouldn’t have called him after anybody as far away as that,” Blanca
shrugged; while Zinnie interposed: “Who was already dead, and couldn’t
have given him a lovely cup for his christening.” Beechy, her face
wrinkling up in sympathy at such a privation, wailed out: “Oh, poor
little Mr. Dobree—”; and Boyne, recognizing the difficulty, pursued:
“Aeneas, then; but he’s almost as far away as Adam, I’m afraid.”
This drew him into a discussion with Terry regarding the relative
seniority of the Biblical and Virgilian heroes, in the intervals of
which Miss Scope continued to demand despairingly: “But what in the
world are you all arguing about, when we know that Adam was the First
Man?”
Judith lifted her head again from its grassy pillow. With half-closed
eyes she murmured to the sky: “I don’t believe Mr. Dobree would care a
bit if his godfather was Adam or not. He could buy himself any
christening cup he liked. I believe he’s a very rich man.”
“Oh, then, do you think he’ll give us all some lovely presents when he
goes?” Zinnie promptly inferred.
“What makes you think he’ll ever go?” Judith retorted, closing her eyes.
“Annibal—Annibal! Annibal begins with an A! I know because he was a
Prince, my ancestor,” shouted Bun, leaping back into the game.
XX
Mrs. Sellars’s social discipline was too perfect to permit her, even in
emergencies, to neglect one obligation for another; and after Mr. Dobree
had been for a week at Cortina she said one day to Boyne: “But I’ve seen
nothing lately of the little Wheaters. What’s become of them?”
He assured her that they were all right, but had probably been too shy
to present themselves at the _châlet_ since Mr. Dobree’s arrival; to
which Mrs. Sellars replied, with the faintest hint of tartness, that she
had never had occasion to suspect the little Wheaters of being shy, and
that, furthermore, Mr. Dobree did not happen to be staying at the
_châlet_.
Boyne smiled. “No; but they know he’s with you a good deal, and he’s a
more impressive figure than they’re used to.”
He saw that she scented irony in this, and was not wholly pleased with
it. “I don’t know what you mean by impressive; I didn’t know anything in
the world could impress the modern hotel child. But Mr. Dobree is very
sorry for them, poor dears, and I’m sure it would interest him to see
something of them. Why shouldn’t we take them all on a picnic to-morrow?
I know Mr. Dobree would like to invite them.”
Boyne felt that, for all the parties concerned, the undertaking might
prove formidable. He pointed out that, if Zinnie and the two
Buondelmonte children were included in an all-day expedition, Miss
Scope’s presence would be necessary, since otherwise all Judith’s
energies would be absorbed in keeping the party in order; and Mrs.
Sellars acquiesced: “Yes, the poor little things are dreadfully spoilt.”
Boyne was secretly beginning to be of the same mind; but Mrs. Sellars
could no longer criticise his young friends without rousing his
instinctive opposition. “They certainly haven’t had much opportunity to
become little Lord Fauntleroys, if that’s what you mean,” he said
impatiently; and his betrothed rejoined: “What I mean is that Mr. Dobree
feels sorry for them because of the kind of opportunity they have had.
You see, he was one of the lawyers in the Westway divorce.”
Boyne gave her a quick look, in which he was conscious that his
resentment flamed. “I’m hanged if I see what there can be in Mr.
Dobree’s mind to make him connect the Westway divorce with the Wheater
children.”
“Why, simply his knowledge of Judith’s intimacy with that wretched
drug-soaked Doll Westway, and his familiarity with the horrible details
that led up to the girl’s suicide. She and Judith were together at
Deauville the very summer that she killed herself. Both their mothers
had gone off heaven knows where. Judith proclaims the fact to every one,
as you know.”
Boyne had removed his eyes from Mrs. Sellars’s face, and was staring out
at the familiar outline of the great crimson mountains beyond the
balcony. A phrase of Stevenson’s about “the lovely and detested scene”
(from “The Ebb-tide,” he thought?) strayed through his mind as he gazed.
It was hateful to him to think that he might hereafter come to associate
those archangelic summits with Mrs. Lullmer’s smooth impervious face,
and Mr. Dobree’s knowledge of the inner history of the Westway divorce.
He turned back to Mrs. Sellars. “Aren’t you getting rather sick of this
place?” he asked abruptly.
She gave back his irritated stare with one of genuine surprise. “Sick of
what? You mean of Cortina?”
“Of the whole show.” His sweeping gesture gathered up in one
contemptuous handful the vast panorama of mountain, vale and forest. “I
always feel that when scenery gets mixed up with our personal bothers
all the virtue goes out of it—as if our worries were so many locusts,
eating everything bare.”
Mrs. Sellars was silent for a moment; then her hand fell on his. “I’ve
always been afraid, dear, that this queer responsibility you’ve assumed
was going to end by getting on your nerves—”
Boyne jumped up, drawing abruptly away from her. “Responsibility? What
responsibility?” He walked across the room, turned back, and awkwardly
laid an answering caress on her hair. “Gammon! It’s Mr. Dobree who gets
on my nerves—just a little.” (“Hypocrite!” he cursed himself inwardly.)
“Fact is, I liked Cortina a damned sight better when you and I and the
children had it all to ourselves.” He saw the light of reassurance in
her averted cheek. “Just my beastly selfishness, I know—I needn’t tell
you that men _are_ beastly selfish, need I?” He laughed, and her faint
laugh echoed his.
“Mr. Dobree is going soon, I believe,” she volunteered.
Boyne pulled himself together. “Well, that makes it a good deal easier
to be unselfish while he’s here, and I take it upon myself to accept his
picnic for to-morrow. I’ll drop down and announce it to the children.”
He flattered himself that his simulation of buoyancy had produced the
desired effect, and that his parting from Mrs. Sellars was unclouded.
But halfway down the hill he stood suddenly still in the path, and
exclaimed aloud: “But after he’s gone; what then?”
The picnic was beautifully successful—one of those smooth creaseless
well-oiled successes as to which one feels that at any moment it may
slip from one’s hold and reveal the face of failure. A very Janus of a
picnic, Boyne thought....
To the chief actors, however, it presented no such duality, but was the
perfect image of what constitutes A Good Time For The Young People, when
made out of the happy union of tact and money. To Mr. Dobree it was
certainly that, and he was justified in feeling that if you order the
two roomiest and most balloon-tired motors obtainable, and fill enough
hampers with the most succulent delicacies of a “Palace” restaurant, and
are actuated throughout by the kindliest desire to give pleasure,
happiness will automatically follow.
As regards the younger members of the party, it undoubtedly did. Terry
was strong enough to enjoy the long day on the heights without fear of
Miss Scope’s thermometer; Blanca was impressed by the lavish fare which
replaced their habitual bread and chocolate; and the small children were
in the state of effervescence induced by freedom from lessons and the
sense of being the central figures of the day.
And Judith—?
After lunch the younger members of the party trailed away with Miss
Scope to hunt for wild strawberries while the others sat pillowed in
moss beside a silver waterfall. Boyne, supine against his boulder,
studied the scene and meditated from behind a screen of pipe smoke.
Judith, a little way off, leaned luxuriously against her mossy cushion,
her hat tossed aside, her head resting in the curve of an immature arm.
Her profile looked small and clear against the auburn tremor of bracken
turned inward by the rush of the water. A live rose burned in her
cheeks, darkening her eyebrows and lashes, and putting a velvet shadow
under her closed lids. She had fallen asleep, and sleep surrendered her
unguarded to her watchers.
“She looks almost grown up—she looks kissable. Why should she, all of a
sudden?” Boyne asked himself, suddenly disturbed, not by her increased
prettiness (the measure of that varied from hour to hour) but by some
new quality in it. He turned his eyes away, and they fell on Mr. Dobree,
who sat facing him in the studied _abandon_ of a picnicker unused to
picnics. Mr. Dobree’s inexhaustible wardrobe had supplied him with just
the slightly shabby homespun suit and slightly faded hat adapted to the
occasion; and Boyne wondered whether it were this change of dress which
made him also seem different. But no: the difference was deeper. Despite
his country clothes, Mr. Dobree did not look easier or less urban; he
merely looked more excited and off his guard. His clear cautious eyes
had grown blurred and furtive; one could almost see a faint line
stretching from them to the recumbent Judith. Along that line it was
manifest that Mr. Dobree’s thoughts were racing; and Boyne knew they
were the same thoughts as his own. The discovery shocked him
indescribably. But he remembered that the levelling tendencies of modern
life have levelled differences of age with the rest; and that Mr. Dobree
was, to all intents and purposes, but little older than himself.
Moreover, he was still brisk and muscular; his glance was habitually
alert; in spite of his silver hair there seemed no reason why he should
not share with Boyne the contemplation of Judith’s defenceless beauty.
But if this was Boyne’s conclusion it was apparently not Mr. Dobree’s.
As Boyne continued to observe him, Mr. Dobree’s habitual pinkness turned
to a red which suffused even his temples and eyelids, so that his
carefully brushed white hair looked like a sunlit cloud against an angry
sky. But with whom was Mr. Dobree angry? Why, with himself, manifestly.
His eyes still rested on the dreaming Judith; but the rest of his face
looked as if every muscle were tightened in the effort to pull the eyes
away. “He’s frightened—he’s frightened at himself,” Boyne thought,
calling to mind—with a faint recoil from the reminder—that he also, once
or twice, had been vaguely afraid of himself when he had looked too long
at Judith. Had his eyes been like that, he wondered? And the muscles of
his face been stretched in the effort to detach the eyes? The thing was
not pleasant to visualise; and he disliked Mr. Dobree the more for
serving as his mirror....
But suddenly Mr. Dobree was on his feet, his whole attention given to
Mrs. Sellars. Again Boyne followed his change of direction with a start.
Mrs. Sellars—but then she had been there all the time! Shadowed by her
spreading hat, her light body bedded in the turf, she looked almost as
young and sylvan as Judith. But somehow she had been merged in the
landscape, all broken up into a dapple of sun and shade, of murmurs and
soughings: her way of fitting into things sometimes had this effect of
effacing her. She lifted her head, and in the shade of the hat-brim
Boyne caught a delicate watchfulness of brows and lips, as of tiny live
things under a protecting leaf.
Mr. Dobree was challenging her jauntily. “Do you see why those young
cannibals should monopolise all the wild strawberries? Suppose we leave
Mr. Boyne to mount guard over the sleeping beauty, and try to bag our
share before it’s too late?”
The words said clearly enough: “Take me away—it’s high time,” and Mrs.
Sellars’s gay little answer: “Come on—I’ll show you a patch they’ll
never find,” seemed to declare as clearly: “I know; but I’ll see that
you don’t come to any mischief.”
She was on her feet before his hands could help her up; something light
and bounding in her seemed to spring to his call. “This way, this way,”
she cried, starting ahead of him up the boulder-strewn way. Boyne heard
their voices mounting the streamside, mingling with the noise of the
water, fading and flashing out again like the glimpses of her dress
through the beech-leaves. He lay without moving, watching the smoke of
his pipe rise in wavering spirals, twisted out of shape by puffs of air
from the waterfall. With Mr. Dobree’s withdrawal the ideas suggested by
his presence had gone too; Judith Wheater seemed once more a little
girl. Though perplexities and uncertainties still lingered on the verge
of Boyne’s mind his central self was anchored in a deep circle of peace.
Every fibre of him was alive to the exquisite moment; but he had no need
to fly from it, no fear of its flying from him. Judith’s sleep was a
calm pool in which he rested.
He fancied he must have been watching her for a long time, his thoughts
enclosing her in a sort of calm fraternal vigilance, when she opened her
eyes and turned them on him, still dewy with sleep.
“Martin!” she hailed him drowsily; then, fully awake, she sat up and
exclaimed: “Darling, when are you going to be married? I’ve positively
got to know at once.”
She was always startling Boyne, but she had perhaps never startled him
more than by this question; for even as she spoke he had been half
unconsciously putting it to himself. He remembered, as something already
far off, picturesque and unreal as a youthful folly, his resentment of
Mrs. Sellars’s delay in fixing a date for their marriage. Was it only
two or three weeks ago that he had sent her, with a basket of gentians
picked on a lofty upland, a quotation from Marvell’s “Coy Mistress”? Now
all that seemed an undergraduate’s impatience. She had taught him that
they were very well as they were, and if he still asked himself when
they were to be married, the question had imperceptibly taken another
form. “What in God’s name will become of the children after we’re
married?” was the way he now instinctively put it.
He too sat up, and gazed into Judith’s sleepy eyes. As he did so he was
aware that an uncomfortable redness (which did not, he hoped, resemble
Mr. Dobree’s) was creeping up to his temples.
“When I’m going to be married? Why? What’s the odds? I don’t know that
it’s anybody’s business, anyhow,” he grumbled in an ill-assured voice.
Judith brushed the rebuff aside. “Oh, but it is—it’s mine. For a very
particular reason,” she continued, as if affectionately resolved to
break down the barrier of his reserve.
“A reason? Nonsense! What has a chit like you got to do with reasons?”
“You mean I’m so unreasonable?” A quick shadow crossed her face. “You
didn’t really mean that?”
“I didn’t mean anything at all—any more than you do. I only meant: why
aren’t we very well as we are?”
Her eyes grew wide at this, and continued to fix him with a half mocking
gravity, while her lips rounded into a smile. “Oh, but, Martin dear,
it’s Mrs. Sellars who ought to say that—not you!”
Boyne burst out laughing. How could one ever keep serious for two
minutes with any of these preposterous children? And once more he told
himself that Judith was as preposterous, and as much of a child, as the
youngest of them.
“You know, darling, you ought to be _empressé_, impatient, passionate,”
she adjured him, as if his very life depended on his following her
advice.
He leaned on his elbow and examined her with deliberation. “Well, of all
the cheek—!”
She shook her head, still smiling. “I’m not cheeky; I’m really not,
Martin. But sometimes you strike me as having so little experience—”
(“Thank you,” Boyne interjected.)
“Oh, I mean in those sorts of ways. As if you’d lived all your life so
far away from the world.”
“From your world? So I have, thank heaven.” After a moment he added with
severity: “So has Mrs. Sellars—thank heaven too.”
The girl stood up, and crossing the mossy space between them, dropped
down beside him and laid her hand on his arm. “Now I’ve offended you.
Doll Westway always said I had no tact. And all I wanted was to explain
why I have to know as soon as possible when you’re to be married.”
“Well, you certainly haven’t explained that,” Boyne answered, turning
away from her to relight his pipe.
“No; but I’m going to. And you’ll be pleased. It’s because we’ve all
clubbed together—even the steps and Scopy have—to give you a really
jolly wedding present; and I think you’ll like what we’ve found. We
unearthed it the other day at Toblach, at the _antiquaire_’s. And we
want to know exactly the right moment to give it to you. You do love
presents, don’t you, Martin?” she urged, as if straining her utmost to
reach some human chord in him. He met the question with another laugh.
“Love presents? I should think I did! Almost as much as you do.” She
coloured a little at the insinuation; and perceiving this, he hastened
on: “It’s awfully dear of you all, and I’m ever so grateful. But there
was no need to be in such a devil of a hurry.”
Her face became all sympathy and interrogation. “Oh, Martin, you don’t
mean—things haven’t gone wrong, have they?” Her look and intonation
showed that she would have been genuinely distressed if they had. A pang
like neuralgia shot through Boyne—yet a pang that was not all bitter. He
took her hand, and laid what she had once called a “grown up kiss” on
it. “Of course not, dear. And thank you—thank you for everything....
Whatever you’ve all chosen for me, I shall love.... Only, you know,
there’s really no sort of hurry.”
She met this in silence, as something manifestly final. Folding her arms
behind her, she let her head droop back on them, and her gaze wandered
lazily skyward through the flicker of boughs.
Boyne had got his pipe going again. Gradually the tumult in his mind
subsided. He sank back lazily at her side, tilting his hat over his
brows, and saying to himself: “What on earth’s the use of thinking
ahead, anyhow?”
Directly in the line of his vision, Judith’s sandalled feet lay in a bed
of bracken, crossed like a resting Mercury’s. He could almost see the
little tufted wings at the heels. For the moment his imagination was
imprisoned in a circle close about them.