Graeme's first thought was that he was dreaming. He blinked his eyes
to make sure they were not playing him false.
If she had disappeared at that moment, he would have sworn to
hallucinations and the visibility of spirits to the day of his death.
But she did not disappear, and Punch proved her no spirit by stalking
gravely up to give her welcome. Without taking her startled eyes off
Graeme, she dropped one white hand on to the great brown head and the
diamonds sprinkled her dove-coloured dress.
"Mr. Graeme!" she said, in a voice which very fully expressed her own
doubts as to his reality also.
"Mar--Miss Brandt? ... Is it possible?"
They had both drawn nearer, he along the broad gravel walk, she along
the narrow path between the eucalyptus trees.
"Are you quite sure you are real?" he asked breathlessly, and for
answer she laughed and stretched a friendly hand towards him.
He took it with shining eyes, and then bent suddenly and kissed it
gently, and his eyes were shining still more brightly as she drew it
hastily away.
"But whatever brings you here?" she asked abruptly.
"We're just out of the sea,"--and the joy of the sea and the morning,
and this greatest thing of all, was in his face.
"But _why_ are you here? What are you doing here?"
"Doing? We're living here."
"Did you know I was here? How----?" she began, with a puzzled wrinkle
of the fair white brow, and stopped.
"I did not know. I wish I had."
"If you did not know, how--why----?"
"If I had known perhaps I should not have dared to follow you. On the
whole I'm glad I did not know."
"I don't understand.... How long have you been here?"
"Just four weeks," he said, with a smile at thought of the blackness
of those four weeks now that he stood in the sunshine.
"Four weeks! Then you mean--you mean that I--that we--followed----"
"In the mere matter of time, yes!--and of place too," he laughed."
For you turned me out of my rooms."
"Do you mean to say you are the Bogey-Man?"
"Well,--no one ever called me so to my face before, but I'm bound to
say I've felt uncommonly like one for the past four or five weeks."
"Come with me," she said hastily. "I must put this right at once, or
Hennie----" and she turned and went through the gap in the hedge.
"Put what right?" he asked, as he followed.
"Oh--you," she said hastily.
"I'm all right--now. And who is Hennie?"
"My friend Miss Penny--"
"I beg your pardon. I thought you said Hennie."
"Henrietta Penny. She was at school with me. We are taking care of one
another."
They had come to the forecourt of the cottage.
"Hen!" cried Margaret. The window was wide open, but the blind was
discreetly down.
"Hello, Chum!" came back in muffled tones. "What's up now? Been and
got yourself lost again?"
"Come out, dear. I want you."
"Half a jiff, old girl. Give a fellow a chance with his back hair. You
had first tub this morning, remember." At which Graeme's eyes twinkled
in unison with Margaret's.
"There's a gentleman waiting to see you, dear," said Margaret, to
prevent any further revelations.
"A _what_?"--and there followed a clatter of falling implements as
though a sudden start had sent them flying. "Wretch!--to upset one
like that! It's that big brown dog, I suppose. I know you, my child!"
Then the blind whirled up and a merry face, in a cloud of dishevelled
hair, looked out, a pair of horrified eyes rested momentarily on
Graeme, and the blind rattled down again with something that sounded
like a muffled feminine objurgation.
And presently the inner door opened and Miss Penny came forth
demurely, and bowed distantly in the direction of Margaret and Graeme.
She was of average height but inclined to plumpness, and so looked
smaller than Margaret; and she had no great pretensions to beauty,
Graeme thought--but then he was biassed for life and incapable of free
and impartial judgment--save such as might be found in a very frank
face given to much laughter, a rather wide mouth and nice white teeth,
abundant dark hair and a pair of challenging brown eyes which now,
getting over their first confusion--and finding herself at all events
fully dressed, wherein she had the advantage of him--rested with much
appreciation on the young man in front of her.
The salt water was still in his hair, and the discrepancies in his
hasty attire were but partly hidden by the damp towel round his neck.
Nevertheless he was very good to look upon. His moustache showed crisp
against the healthy brown of his face; his hair, short as it was, had
a natural ripple which sea-water could not reduce; and his eyes were
brimming with the new joy of life and repressed laughter. Miss Penny
liked the looks of him.
"Margaret Brandt, I will never forgive you as long as I live," said
she emphatically.
"All right, dear! This is Mr. Bogey-man whose rooms we have
appropriated. He wished to be introduced to the other malefactor. Miss
Henrietta Penny--Mr. John Graeme! Mr. Graeme and I have met before."
If Mr. John Graeme had had more experience of women, the flash that
shot across from the brown eyes to the dark blue ones might have told
him stories--for instance, that his name and would-have-been standing
towards her friend were not entirely unknown to Miss Penny; that, for
a brief half second, she wondered--doubted--and instantly chid herself
for such a thought in connection with Margaret Brandt.
But Margaret herself, being a woman, caught the momentary challenge
and repelled it steadily.
"I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Penny--in such a place, and in
such company. I have heard of you from Miss Brandt," said Graeme.
"Never till five minutes ago," laughed Margaret.
"Yes, if you will pardon me--once before, at Lady Elspeth Gordon's.
Unless I am mistaken, Miss Penny had just been across to Dublin to
take a degree which Cambridge ungallantly declined to confer upon
her."
"Quite right!" said Miss Penny. "M.A. They're misogynists at
Cambridge."
"Will you oblige me by informing Miss Penny, Mr. Graeme, that this
meeting is purely accidental? I caught a spark in her eye and I know
what it means. Had you the very slightest idea that we were coming to
Sark?"
"Not the remotest. When I saw you standing in the hedge there, with
the morning glories all about you, I first doubted my eyes, then I
thought you a vision--"
"And do you think it possible that I knew of you being here?"
"I am certain you did not. Nobody knows. I left no address, and I told
no one where I was going. I have not had a letter since I left London.
I have been buried alive in this heavenly little place."
"There now, Mademoiselle," said Margaret, with a bow. "Are you
satisfied now?"
"I was satisfied before you opened your mouth, my dear. The
possibility inevitably suggested itself, but it was stillborn. Has not
our friendship passed its seventh birthday?"
"Thank you, dear. But the coincidence of our coming to bury ourselves
in Sark, and Mr. Graeme's coming to bury himself in Sark, was almost
unbelievable."
"Not at all," said Miss Penny. "If you could both trace back you would
probably find the same original spring of action--a chance word from
some common friend, or some article you have both read. Then, when
circumstances loosed the spring, you both shot in the same direction.
What was it loosed your spring, Mr. Graeme?"
"Well,--I wanted to get away out of things. I'm busy on a book, you
see, and I'd heard of Sark--"
"Same here!" said Miss Penny--"less the book. We wanted to get away
out of things--and people, and we'd heard of Sark, and here we are.
Was it you suggested Sark, or I, Meg?"
"I'm sure I don't know, dear. You, I should think."
"I will take all the credit of it."
Just then Mrs. Carré, who had been down to John Philip's for bread,
turned in out of the road with a loaf under each arm. At sight of all
her guests fraternising, her face lit up with a broad smile, and
Scamp, who had whirled in after her, twisted himself into
hieroglyphics of delight and rent the air with his expression of it,
and then launched himself at Punch and taxed him with perfidy in going
off to bathe without him.
"Ah, you have med friends with the leddies," she said to Graeme.
"Scamp! Bad beast, be qui-et! A couche!"
"I'm doing my best, Mrs. Carré."
"That iss very nice."
"Very nice, indeed!" And Miss Penny asserted afterwards that he was
looking at Margaret all the time.
"I told them you were a nice quiet gentleman and wouldn't disturb them
at all," said Mrs. Carré.
"I'll do my very best not to. So far the disturbance has been all on
their side, but I'm standing it very well, you see. You'll let me show
you the sights, won't you?" he said to Miss Brandt. "I've been here a
month, you see, and I know it all like a book. I've done nothing but
moon about since I came--"
"I thought you were busy on a book," said Miss Penny.
"Er--well, you see, you have to do a lot of thinking before you start
writing. I've been thinking," and perhaps more than one of them had a
fairly shrewd suspicion as to the line his thoughts had taken.
"Now, if I don't cut away and dress, and get my breakfast and clear
out, I shall be in the way of the ladies, and Mrs. Carré will never
forgive me," he said. "I do hope you will include me in your plans for
the day."
His bow included them both, and he sped off up the path through the
high hedge, with the two dogs racing alongside.
"Meg, my child, we will go for a little walk," said Miss Penny.
V
The salt Sark air is uplifting at all times. The sea-water has a crisp
effervescence of its own which tones and braces mind and body alike.
Add to these the wonder of Margaret's unexpected presence there and,
if the gift of large imagination be yours, you may possibly
arrive--within a hundred miles or so--of the state of John Graeme's
feelings as he raced up that path and bounded up the stairs of the Red
House four at a time.
He looked out of the wide-open window across the fields, while the
dogs, as usual, took the opportunity of appeasing their thirst at his
water-jug,--for water lies at the bottom of deep cool wells in Sark,
and sensible dogs take their chances when they offer.
Was this the room he had left an hour ago in the fresh of the dawn--a
man whose gray future was just beginning to lift its bruised head out
of the shadows?
Were those gleaming emerald fields the dim wastes he had sped across
with his dumb companion, feeling as friendly towards him as towards
anything on earth?
Were those trees over there, with the glow of spring-gold in their
tender green leaves, the gloomy guardians of the churchyard where
ghosts walked of a night?
Was that streak of blue away beyond the uplands, with the purple film
along its rim, only the sea and a hint of Jersey, or was it a glimpse
of heaven?
Was he, in very truth, that John Graeme who, for thirty days past, had
been striving with all his might to root the thought of Margaret
Brandt out of his life--and succeeding not at all?
It was the face of a stranger--a stranger with new joy of life in his
sparkling eyes--that looked back at him out of the glass, as he plied
his brushes, and tied his neck-tie with a careful assiduity to which
the John Graeme of the past thirty days had been a stranger indeed.
It was amazing. It was almost past belief. Yet this was himself, and
there was the gap in the dark hedge--never dark again to him so long
as one twig of it lived--the gap where he had come upon her standing
like a goddess of the morning with the glories of the dawn all about
her. And somewhere not far away, under this same heavenly blue sky,
was Margaret. And there was no sign or hint of Jeremiah Pixley in her
atmosphere--nor of Charles Svendt.
What could it possibly all mean?
Miss Penny--Hennie Penny! What a delightfully ludicrous name! And what
a delightful creature she was!--Miss Penny, unless he had been
dreaming, had said they had come to get away from things--and people!
Now what did she mean by that--if she really had said it and he had
not been dreaming?
Was it possible Margaret had come to get away from Jeremiah Pixley and
Charles Svendt? On the face of it, it seemed not impossible, for
Graeme's only wonder was that she could ever have borne with them so
long.
His brain was in a whirl. The eyes of his understanding were as the
eyes of one immured for thirty days in a dark cell and then dragged
suddenly into the full blaze of the sun. If he had just drunk a magnum
of champagne he could not have felt more elevated, and he would
certainly have felt very different. For his eye was clear as a jewel,
and his hand was steady as a rock, though his heart had not yet
settled to its beat and the red blood danced in his veins like fire.
"Jock, my lad," he said to himself, as he got the knot of his tie to
his liking at last,--"keep a grip of yourself and go steady. Such a
thing is enough to throw any man a bit off the rails. Ca' canny, my
lad, ca' canny!"