The day was over, and they were going back.
Their host insisted on accompanying them to the station. They had given
him a day, and every moment of it, he declared solemnly, was precious.
They could hardly have spent it better than with Nicky in his perfect
house, his perfect garden. And Nicky had been charming, with his humble
ardour, his passion for a perfection that was not his.
The day, Miss Holland intimated, was his, Nicky's present, rather than
theirs. He glowed. It had been glorious, anyhow, a perfect day. A day,
Nicky said, that made him feel immortal.
He looked at Jane Holland and George Tanqueray, and they tried not to
smile. Jane would have died rather than have hurt Nicky's feelings. It
was not in her to spoil his perfect day. All the same, it had been their
secret jest that Nicky _was_ immortal. He would never end, never by any
possibility disappear. As he stuck now, he always would stick. He was
going with them to the station.
Sensitive to the least quiver of a lip, the young man's mortal part was
stung with an exquisite sense of the becoming.
"If I feel it," said he, "what must _you_ feel?"
"Oh, we!" they cried, and broke loose from his solemn and detaining
eyes.
They walked on ahead, and Nicholson was left behind with Laura Gunning
and Nina Lempriere. He consented, patiently and politely, to be thus
outstripped. After all, the marvellous thing was that he should find
himself on that road at all with Them. After all, he had had an hour
alone with Him, in his garden, and five-and-twenty minutes by his watch
with Her. It was enough if he could keep his divinities in sight,
following the flutter of Miss Holland's veil.
Besides, she had asked him to talk to Nina and look after Laura. She was
always asking him to be an angel, and look after somebody. Being an
angel seemed somehow his doom. But he was sorry for Laura. They said she
had cared for Tanqueray; and he could well believe it. He could believe
in any woman caring for Him. He wondered how it had left her. A little
defiant, he thought, but with a quiet, clear-eyed virginity. Determined,
too. Nicholson had never seen so large an expression of determination on
so small a face.
He always liked talking to Laura; but he shrank inexpressibly from
approaching Nina, the woman with unquiet eyes and nervous gestures, and
a walk that suggested the sweep of a winged thing to its end. A glance
at Nina told him that wherever she was she could look after herself.
Morose, fearlessly disarrayed, and with it all a trifle haggard and
forlorn, Nina Lempriere had the air of not belonging to them. She
paused, she loitered, she swept tempestuously ahead, but none of her
movements had the slightest reference to her companions. From time to
time he glanced uncomfortably at Nina.
"Leave her," said Laura, "to herself."
"Do you think," he said, "she minds being left?"
"Not she. She likes it. You don't suppose she's thinking of _us_?"
"Dear me, no; but one likes to be polite."
"She'd so much rather you were sincere."
"I say, mayn't I be both?"
"Oh yes, but you couldn't always be with Nina. She makes you feel
sometimes as if it was no use your existing."
"Do you think," he said, "she'll stand beside Jane Holland?"
"No. She may go farther."
"Go farther? How?"
"She's got a better chance."
"A better chance? I shouldn't have backed her chance against Miss
Holland's."
"It _is_ better. She doesn't get so mixed up with people. If she _were_
to----"
He waited.
"She'd go with a rush, in one piece, and either die or come out of it
all right. Whereas Jane----"
He waited breathlessly.
"Jane would be torn to tatters, inch by inch."
Nicholson felt a curious constriction across his chest. His throat dried
as he spoke again.
"What do you think would tear her most?"
"Oh, if she married."
"I thought you meant that."
"The thing is," said Laura, "not to marry." She said it meditatively and
without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had
been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept
her view.
He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same
thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He,
Tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they
all took. Not to marry.
He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to
chastity and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How
wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the
things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of
course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary
priest and priestesses of a god diviner than desire. And She--he saw her
more virgin, more perfect than they all.
"You think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if Miss
Holland--married it would injure her career?"
"Injure it? There wouldn't be any career left to injure."
Was it really so? He recorded, silently, his own determination to
remember that. It had for him, also, the consecration of a vow.
A thought struck him. Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him
and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a
preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the
situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity,
renouncing Jane.
Another thought struck him. It struck him hard, with the shock almost of
blasphemy. It broke into speech.
"Not," he said, "if she were to marry Him?"
Laura was silent, and he wondered.
Why not? After all it was natural. She matched him. The thing was
inevitable, and it was fitting. So supremely fitting was it that he
could not very well complain. He could give her up to George Tanqueray.
X
Jane Holland and Tanqueray had left the others some considerable way
behind. It was possible, they agreed, to have too much of Nicky, though
he did adore them.
The wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop
down into Wendover. A white road, between grass borders and hedgerows,
their green powdered white with the dust of it. Over all, the pallor of
the first white hour of twilight.
For a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight
and the road were theirs.
The two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging
challenge to fatigue. He, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step
of some fine, untamed animal. She, at his side, kept the wild pace he
set with a smooth motion of her own. She carried, high and
processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host's garden, wild
parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. As she
went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. A light wind
woke on the hill and played with her. Her long veil, grey-blue and
transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted
about her, now clinging to her neck, her breasts, now fluttering itself
free.
He looked at her, and thought that if Gisborne, R.A., hadn't been an
idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. Protected
by the charm of Rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of
Jane's. He could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a
woman, she had points. He could afford, being extremely happy himself,
to make Jane happy too.
So sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that Jane
was utterly defenceless and exposed.
"Yes," he said, "it's been a day."
"Hasn't it?"
She saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. The coming joy, the joy of
his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he
looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her
again.
"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"
"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been
indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."
It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her
about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been
manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she
was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse
than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite
feeling of treachery toward Jane.
Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that
they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in?
"It was you, Jane, who did it."
"No, George; it was you. You introduced him."