After that, for the moment anyhow, it was all over with Lucy. She was
engulfed. Wemyss kissed her shut eyes, he kissed her parted lips, he
kissed her dear, delightful bobbed hair. His tears dried up; or rather,
wiped away by her little blind, shaking hand, there were no more of
them. Death for Wemyss was indeed at that moment swallowed up in
victory. Instantly he passed from one mood to the other, and when she
finally did open her eyes at his orders and look at him, she saw bending
over her a face she hardly recognised, for she had not yet seen him
happy. Happy! How could he be happy, as happy as that all in a moment?
She stared at him, and even through her confusion, her bewilderment, was
frankly amazed.
Then the thought crept into her mind that it was she who had done this,
it was she who had transformed him, and her stare softened into a gaze
almost of awe, with something of the look in it of a young mother when
she first sees her new-born baby. 'So that is what it is like,' the
young mother whispers to herself in a sort of holy surprise, 'and I have
made it, and it is mine'; and so, gazing at this new, effulgent Wemyss,
did Lucy say to herself with the same feeling of wonder, of awe at her
own handiwork, 'So that is what he is like.'
Wemyss's face was indeed one great beam. He simply at that moment
couldn't remember that he had ever been miserable. He seemed to have his
arms round Love itself; for never did any one look more like the very
embodiment of his idea of love than Lucy then as she gazed up at him, so
tender, so resistless. But there were even more wonderful moments after
dinner in the darkening garden, while Miss Entwhistle was upstairs
packing ready to start by the early train next morning, and they hadn't
got the gate between them, and Lucy of her own accord laid her cheek
against his coat, nestling her head into it as though there indeed she
knew that she was safe.
'My baby--my baby,' Wemyss murmured, in an ecstasy of passionate
protectiveness, in his turn flooded by maternal feeling. 'You shall
never cry again never, never.'
It irked him that their engagement--Lucy demurred at first to the word
engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would
very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her
position at that moment--it irked him that it had to be a secret. He
wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his
pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was
even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word
impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his
wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the
faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends
would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should
approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not
greatly imaginative, could picture. And Lucy, quite overwhelmed, first
by his tears and then by his joy, no longer could judge anything. She no
longer knew whether it were very awful to be love-making in the middle
of death, or whether it were, as Wemyss said, the natural glorious
self-assertiveness of life. She knew nothing any more except that he and
she, shipwrecked, had saved each other, and that for the moment nothing
was required of her, no exertion, nothing at all, except to sit passive
with her head on his breast, while he called her his baby and softly,
wonderfully, kissed her closed eyes. She couldn't think; she needn't
think; oh, she was tired--and this was rest.
But after he had gone that night, and all the next day in the train
without him, and for the first few days in London, misgivings laid hold
of her.
That she should be being made love to, be engaged, as Wemyss insisted,
within a week of her father's death, could not, she thought, be called
anything worse than possibly and at the outside an irrelevance. It did
no harm to her father's dear memory; it in no way encroached on her
adoration of him. He would have been the first to be pleased that
she should have found comfort. But what worried her was that
Everard--Wemyss's Christian name was Everard--should be able to think of
such things as love and more marriage when his wife had just died so
awfully, and he on the very spot, and he the first to rush out and
see....
She found that the moment she was away from him she couldn't get over
this. It went round and round in her head as a thing she was unable, by
herself, to understand. While she was with him he overpowered her into a
torpor, into a shutting of her eyes and her thoughts, into just giving
herself up, after the shocks and agonies of the week, to the blessedness
of a soothed and caressed semi-consciousness; and it was only when his
first letters began to come, such simple, adoring letters, taking the
situation just as it was, just as life and death between them had
offered it, untroubled by questioning, undimmed by doubt, with no
looking backward but with a touching, thankful acceptance of the
present, that she gradually settled down into that placidity which was
at once the relief and the astonishment of her aunt. And his letters
were so easy to understand. They were so restfully empty of the
difficult thoughts and subtle, half-said things her father used to write
and all his friends. His very handwriting was the round, slow
handwriting of a boy. Lucy had loved him before; but now she fell in
love with him, and it was because of his letters.