Rachel had believed on the first night of her arrival in Tavistock
Square that, so far as her love affair was concerned, she would be able
to avoid all danger by keeping her lover and her aunt unknown to each
other. She very soon found, however, that the spell Miss Deane seemed
to have put upon her was not to be laid by any effect of mere distance.
She and Adrian met rather shyly at their first appointment. Both of
them were a little conscious of having been overbold, one for having
suggested, and the other for having agreed to so significant an
assignation. And for the first few minutes their talk was nothing but a
quick, nervous reminiscence of their earlier meetings. They had to
recover the lost ground on which they had parted before they could go
on to any more intimate knowledge of each other. But for some reason
she had not yet realised, Rachel found it very difficult to recover
that lost ground. She knew that she was being unnecessarily distant and
cold, and though she inwardly accused herself of "putting on absurd
airs," her manner, as she was uncomfortably aware, remained at once
stilted and detached.
"I suppose it's because I'm self-conscious before all these people,"
she thought, and, indeed, Hyde Park was very full that afternoon.
And it was Adrian who first, a little desperately, tried to reach
across the barrier that was dividing them.
"You're different, rather, in town," he began shyly. "Is it the effect
of your aunt's grandeurs?"
"Am I different? I feel exactly the same," Rachel replied mechanically.
"You didn't think it was rather impudent of me to ask you to meet me
here, did you?" he went on anxiously.
She shook her head emphatically. "Oh! no, it wasn't that," she said.
"But then you admit that it was--something?" he pleaded.
"The people, perhaps," she admitted. "I--I feel so exposed to the
public view."
"We might walk across the Park if you preferred it," he suggested; "and
have tea at that place in Kensington Gardens? It would be quieter
there."
She agreed to that willingly. She wanted to be alone with him. The
crowd made her nervous and self-conscious this afternoon. Always
before, she had delighted in moving among a crowd, appreciating and
enjoying the casual glances of admiration she received. Today she was
afraid of being noticed. She had a queer feeling that these smart,
clever people in the Park might see through her, if they stared too
closely. Just what they would discover she did not know; but she
suffered a disquieting qualm of uneasiness whenever she saw any one
observing her with attention.
They cut across the grass and, leaving the Serpentine on their left,
found two chairs in a quiet spot under the trees. Here, at least, they
were quite unwatched, but still Rachel found it impossible to regain
the relations that had existed between her and Adrian when they had
parted a month earlier. And Adrian, too, it seemed, was staring at her
with a new, inquisitive scrutiny.
"Why do you look at me like that?" she broke out at last. "Do you
notice any difference in me, or what? You--you've been staring so!"
"Difference!" he repeated. "Well, I told you just now, didn't I, that
you were different this afternoon?"
"Yes, but in what way?" she asked. "Do I--do I look different?"
He paused a little judiciously over his answer. "N--no," he hesitated.
"There's something, though. Don't be offended, will you, if I say that
you don't seem to be quite yourself to-day; not quite natural. I miss a
rather characteristic expression of yours. You've never once looked at
me with that rather tolerating air you used to put on."
"It was a horrid air," she said sharply. "I've made up my mind to cure
myself of it."
"Oh! no, don't," he protested. "It wasn't at all horrid. It was--don't
think I'm trying to pay you a compliment--it was, well, charming. I've
missed it dreadfully."
She turned and looked at him, determined to try an experiment. "This
sort of air, do you mean?" she asked, and with a sickening sensation of
presenting the very gestures and appearance of her aunt, she regarded
him under lowered eyelids with an expression of faintly supercilious
approval.
His smile at once thanked and answered her.
"But it's an abominable look," she exclaimed. "The look of an old, old,
painted woman, vain, ridiculous."
He stared at her in amazement. "How absurd!" he protested. "Why, it's
_you_; and you're certainly not old or painted nor unduly vain, and no
one could say you were ridiculous."
"And you want me to look like that?" she asked.
"It's--it's so _you_," he said shyly.
"But, just suppose," she cried, "that I went on looking like that after
I'd grown old and ugly. Think how hateful it would be to see a hideous
old woman posturing and pretending and making eyes. And, you see, if
one gets a habit, it's so hard to get rid of it. Think of me at
seventy, all painted and powdered, trying to seem as if I hadn't
altered and really believing that I hadn't."
He laughed that pleasant, kind laugh of his which had been one of the
first things in him that had so attracted her.
"Oh! I'll chance the future," he said. "Besides if--if it could ever
happen that--that your growing old came to me gradually, that I should
be seeing you every day, I mean, I shouldn't notice it. I should be old
too; and _I_ should think you hadn't altered either." He was afraid, as
yet, to be too plain spoken, but his tone made it quite clear that he
asked for no greater happiness than that of seeing her grow old beside
him.
She did not pretend to misunderstand him. "Would you? Perhaps you
would," she said. "But, all the same, I don't think you need insist on
that particular--pose."
He passed that by, too eager at the moment to claim the concession she
had offered him. "Is there any hope that I may be allowed to--to watch
you growing old?" he asked.
"Perhaps--if you'll let me do it in my own way," Rachel said.
Adrian shyly took her hand. "You mean that you will--that you don't
mind?" He put the question as if he had no doubt of its
intelligibility--to her.
She nodded.
"When did you begin to know?" he asked, awed by the wonder of this
stupendous thing that had happened to him.
"From the beginning, I think," Rachel murmured.
"So did I, from the very beginning--" he agreed, and from that they
dropped into sacred reminiscences and comparisons concerning the
innumerable things they had adoringly seen in each other and had had as
yet no opportunity to glory in.
And in the midst of all these new and bewildering, embarrassing,
delightful revelations and discoveries, Rachel completely forgot the
shadow that was haunting her, forgot how she looked or felt or acted,
forgot that there was or had ever been a terrible old woman who lived
in Tavistock Square and whose hold on life was maintained by her
horrible mimicry of youth. And then, in a moment, she was lifted out of
her dream and cruelly set down on the hard, unsympathetic earth by the
sound of her lover's voice.
"I suppose I'll have to meet your aunt?" he was saying. "Shall we go
back there now, and tell her?"
Rachel flushed, as if he had suggested some startling invasion of her
secret life. "Oh! no," she ejaculated impulsively.
Adrian looked his surprise. "But why not?" he asked. "I'm--I'm a
perfectly respectable, eligible party."
"I wasn't thinking of that," Rachel said.
"Is she a terrible dragon?" he inquired with a smile.
Rachel shook her head, rejecting the excuse offered in favour of a more
probable modification. "She's odd rather. She might prefer my giving
her some kind of notice," she said.
He accepted that without hesitation. "Will you warn her then?" he
replied. "And I'll come and do my duty to-morrow. I understand she's a
lady to be propitiated."
"Not to-morrow," Rachel said.
The irk and disgust of it all had returned to her with renewed force at
the first mention of her aunt's name. The thought of Miss Deane had
revived the repulsive sense of acting, speaking, looking like that aged
caricature of herself. Yet she wanted strangely enough, to get back to
Tavistock Square; for only there, it seemed to her, was she safe from
the examination of an inquisitive stare that might at any moment
penetrate her secret and reveal her as a posturing hag masquerading in
the alluring freshness of a young girl.
"I ought to be going back to her now," she said.
"But you promised that we should have tea together," Adrian
remonstrated.
"Yes, I know; but please don't pester me. I'll see you again
to-morrow," Rachel returned with a touch of elderly hauteur. And,
despite all his entreaties, she would not be persuaded to change her
mind. Already he was looking at her with a touch of suspicion, she
thought; and as she checked his remonstrances, she was aware of doing
it with the air, the tone, the very look that were her inheritance from
endless generations of precisely similar ancestors.