_The best man on the train may be the
guard in the van—make friends with him._
It was not so easy for Miles to hide himself at Euston Station as Mrs.
Sloane had seemed to imagine. He was one of those who show in a crowd,
being bigger than most, and, according to his mother, handsomer. And
he was a little reckless until he had seen the object of his search.
Once he had seen Diana walk down the platform with her chin in the air,
as was her habit, approved by her uncle, who thought she walked as a
woman should walk, and as few did, he was more cautious, and dodged
behind mountains of luggage, but never losing sight of the figure in
blue tweed. She wore her hat well pulled down over her eyes, and he
was glad. Once his he would want the whole world to see her, but till
then he would have all men blind to her beauty. He bet himself five
shillings she would buy “Blackwood” at the bookstall, and she bought
it. Feeling himself the richer of five shillings—he held himself
justified in giving it to the porter who was looking after her luggage:
then he committed her to the care of the guard, and he asked nothing
of the guard he was not ready to pay for. At the last moment he took
possession of his sleeping-compartment within a few doors of Diana’s.
Then he committed her into God’s safe keeping for the night—the guard
on the train and God in Heaven; she must be safe. To the guard he had
offered money—to God he offered the rest of his life if He would only
give him Diana, to take care of—forever. Was it irreverent? Far from
it, never in his life had he felt more humbly reverent.
Diana as she travelled thought how different it had been so short a
time ago when she had travelled up with Uncle Marcus. Now there was
nothing to look forward to and everything to dread. Shan’t might be
dangerously ill! That she might not recover Diana would not have
admitted even to herself. But there was the feeling underneath
everything that life might not give her all she had asked of it. The
thought was disquieting because she had asked of it only what she must
have! Diana was young and she slept—although she had been certain she
could not sleep—and she awoke in Scotland, and Scotland is Scotland
and must not be denied. She demands, at least, that the traveller
shall look out and wonder at her beauty. So Diana dressed and went out
into the corridor and looked down into the glens, rushing past; on to
the rowans, red with berries, and up to the torrents of water that
streamed down the mountain-sides. Life, after all, could not cheat
her. The morning sang aloud for very joy; not only the burns and the
waterfalls, but everything sang.
Then she discovered she was hungry and she was certain she could never
get a breakfast-basket. Arrived at the station, where these things are
to be had, for those who have the forethought to order them, she looked
out of the window, and the first thing she saw was Miles Hastings
striding towards her—followed by a man carrying two breakfast-baskets.
“You!” she exclaimed. “How did you get here?”
“By train, just as you did,” he answered. “I knew your father wouldn’t
like it if you didn’t have your breakfast properly. You see my duties
don’t end when I land in England. Will you come to another carriage?
It’s not very nice eating in a sleeping-berth, is it? Will you come?
I have reserved a compartment. This most excellent man bears baps and
bacon and eggs and marmalade and tea. Coming?”
Diana was already coming, curiosity, if nothing else, compelling her.
How had he really come? She had little dreamed that all night he had
been so close to her: that every time the train had stopped at a
station he had mounted guard outside her door.
“Don’t talk until you have had breakfast,” he said; “then I want to
talk to you very seriously—don’t look so adorable, because it upsets
me. I never imagined any one could look so clean as you look after a
journey.”
“And you have shaved, haven’t you?” she asked; and he laughed and
said he wouldn’t be her father’s A.D.C. if he hadn’t. Then he assured
her—“Shan’t is going to get quite well. I read up concussion, before I
didn’t go to sleep last night. Don’t ask any questions! Never ask me to
explain why I am here, because it cannot be explained except that there
are more angels on this earth than even Heaven knows of. I always knew
there was one—go on eating.”
Diana reminded him that angels did not eat, but in spite of that he
begged her to have some more. She couldn’t eat two eggs? Had she ever
tried? She couldn’t remember that she had. Not even after hunting? No?
They were dull things to talk about, anyhow! Should he put the baskets
under the seat? He put them under the seat.
“Now tell me?” he said.
“Tell you what?” she asked.
“Why did he call you Diana?” Of enormous importance this: it had
weighed on his heart for days, or weeks was it?
“Who?” asked Diana.
“Do you really not know?”
She said so many people had called her by her name: so few people
called her by any one else’s. She mightn’t have answered to Caroline if
he—whoever he was—had called her that. Then she added: “It’s quite a
nice name, though, isn’t it? It’s a stately name.”
“Diana—do be nice to me,” he pleaded.
“Call me Caroline, and see.”
He called her Caroline, and she put out her hand and withdrew it.
“Diana,” he said, “don’t tease me.”
“If he—whoever he was—had called me Caroline you wouldn’t have minded?”
“If he had said Caroline had sent him to fetch me off the island, I
shouldn’t have known who in the world Caroline was.”
“It was then he called me Diana, was it?”
“Yes, it was then.”
“How dared he spoil everything?”
“He did spoil everything; you admit it; then you were happy?”—this
triumphantly. It was an admission on her part.
He was so desperately anxious she should admit she had been happy; but
she was in a distracting and provoking mood. Why should she smile at
the hills and not at him? “Were you happy, Diana? Tell me.”
She nodded.
He wanted to know just how happy? Had she been as happy as he had been?
It was not possible. She had not prayed for him every night as he had
prayed for her—she could not say she had?
No, she could not; she had never even thought of him. But after they
had met, he pleaded—then—had she not thought of him? They must compare
notes. She vowed her notes were so lightly pencilled on her memory, she
could hardly read them—a thought here, another there.
His notes were indelibly written on his heart. The first time he had
seen her was one. He told her what he had thought of her. What had
she thought of him? She wouldn’t say. Driven to say something, she
confessed she had thought him—tall—yes, tall _for his age_....
“Darling, don’t look out of the window. I know your little nose by
heart—I love your profile—but tell me, do you remember anything else, I
mean what you thought of me—it sounds so conceited to imagine for one
moment that you thought anything—but if you did—?”
“Let me think—don’t disturb me!” She shut her eyes, and said, “I will
try to remember.”
He waited. Was she really going to sleep? If he had been Uncle Marcus
he would have been taken in; being more modern, he was not, but he had
never seen her asleep and she looked so lovely that he let her sleep
on, which was not in the least what she had expected; moreover, it was
very dull, so she opened her eyes and asked if she had been asleep?
And when he said, “No,” she vowed to herself this was no man to marry
lightly—too unerring an intuition was his.
“Will you always know what I am thinking and feeling?” she asked.
He doubted it. He never knew of what she was thinking or what she was
feeling. “Tell me something of what you feel.” And she told him how
hungry she had felt when she had travelled south, from Loch Bossie, and
what a comfort the parcel had been, how glad she had been to see the
cocoanut shells.
“Why?” he asked.
Because, she said, she thought—as he had condescended to a joke—a bad
one, of course, but a joke—it showed he could not be so angry with her
after all.
“And that comforted you?” Another admission, this!
“Yes, it comforted me.”
“Then you must have minded my being angry with you?”
Diana smiled at him. He was too, too clever.
Then he wanted to know about the parcel. How had she got it? Because
he had wanted it—he had told Pillar so. “I wanted to keep it,” he said,
“and some day I was going to pay you out—when you were hungry—on our
honeymoon.” She let this pass unchallenged. “Diana, did you understand
what I said?”
“Why should you have wanted to pay me out? Did you mind being left on
the island?” She ignored the honeymoon.
And he said, of course he had minded. If she had stayed with him, he
would have loved it. As it was, he had had no one to love but Robinson;
he could not imagine what he would have done without Robinson, he had
been so sympathetic and—jolly.
Diana wasn’t particularly interested in Robinson. She wanted to know
more about that loneliness from which Miles had suffered so acutely.
On that he would not dwell, but rather on the happiness of being on
a desert island alone with Diana—some day! Wouldn’t she love it? She
thought so, but suggested that if Pillar came too it might be more
comfortable. He admitted it, accusing her of being a sybarite.
“You would never enjoy roughing it. You are meant to walk on red
carpets—oh—that fatal snare of the red carpet! You shall walk on it
some day—but just for once let’s go to a desert island. Have you ever
imagined what it would be?”
Then Diana turned her face from the window to look at Miles, and she
asked him if they had not both been on a desert island—each on their
own—the last few days—or was it years? And Miles, seeing in her eyes
the smile she had kept throughout the journey for mountains and burns,
jumped to a glorious conclusion.
“You mean that the whole world is a desert island if we are not
together?”
And that was just what she did mean, although she had not been able
to express it. She had hesitated to put it into words, and now that
she found the courage she found no words and she discovered, like many
another before her, that they are but dumb things after all: that
there are other ways and better ways of saying things: that nothing
is so expressive as a silence, nothing tells so much or tells it so
tenderly—that is, if it be a happy silence. The unbroken silence of
misunderstanding is another thing.
“Now tell me,” she said, “what you want to say—I will be very serious.”
Miles had only to pass on the message the old woman had given him over
the low stone wall, on his way to Glenbossie. In her Gaelic-spoken
message she had given him the eternally old message, and though he
“had not Gaelic,” he had understood it, because she had spoken in the
universal language. A lover’s language may be as new as the morning; it
is also as old as the hills. And that old woman had not forgotten the
days of her youth, and why? Because the sun was in the heavens, by day,
to remind her: the stars in the sky at night: the burn on the hillside:
the heather on the moor: the little children passing by—tender
reminders, these. Even the rain must re-awaken memories of the enfolded
plaid: the peat smoke bring back memories of evenings when the day was
past and over, the harvest gathered in, and the bairns asleep.
As with Dick and his mother the parting lay like a weight on the hearts
of Miles and Diana. When she said it would not be for long, he laughed.
She little knew how short a time it might be, or that it rested with
her to make it short or interminable. He had promised to leave her when
he had seen her into the train which should take her on to Loch Bossie
and he saw her into that train. When she asked him why he didn’t come
on with her, he said it was against orders. Against whose? she wanted
to know. He would not tell her. She asked him if he should go south
that night?
And he said he should go to Glenbossie by the next train.
“Why not by this?”
Because, he said, he had promised not to go by her train unless
something should happen to make him alter his plans.
The dear old lady would have been more human if she had not made this
impossible condition, he thought, but she had made it.
“Diana?” he said.
“What?”
“You have never told me.”
“No—”
“Won’t you?”
She shook her head. There wasn’t time—it would take years—the train was
going—it was off—Miles was left on the platform.
Then Diana looked out of the carriage window, smiled at him, and drew
back—and with one stride Miles was on the step of the guard’s van—
Having made friends with the guard, which was not difficult, he sat
down to write to Mrs. Sloane. He sat on a stout wooden box, which,
according to the label, belonged to one Christina MacDonald. He
hoped Christina was as happy as he was. She must be: perhaps she had
gone from London and was going home. From London to Scotland. Happy
Christina! Perhaps she was going home to be married! Dear Christina! He
loved her, as he loved every one in the world that morning. But he must
write his letter: he wrote:
“I am in the guard’s van. The circumstances proved quite exceptional—I
did not make them so—and the separation was more than I could bear.
Now that I am near her I am absurdly happy, because I believe she is
a little unhappy because—she thinks—I am not near her. I saw her into
this train, as I promised, and just as the train was going out of the
station she popped her beautiful little head out of the window and
smiled at me—I thought I saw tears in her eyes! Do I stand exonerated?
How can I thank you? I shall never be able to. There is so much I want
to say and I am too shy to say it. Why need I say anything to you who
understand everything? But I feel in honour bound to explain to you why
I am in the guard’s van—you must have known I should be there! As a boy
I thought it the best place on the train—now I know one better!”