A thin, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured
steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel,
flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and
larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on
the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the
clanking bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded
herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she would
presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and that the
midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.
Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost hand. But for
this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon her way, Lynette knew that
she might have wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.
She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and
are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent,
essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be
swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and
led, and to love the guide.
Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle
of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of
the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the
homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet
with the beating of celestial wings.
She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the
pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself
and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of
wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her,
she said to herself that she would win him back again.
She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line
of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes
were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went
forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered
over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully
tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was
as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden,
had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out
with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then
dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging
freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen
companion at her side.
The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant
golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human
figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the
harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in
Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled,
building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a
human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the
little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And
Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.
It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon
the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup
fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping
mother--a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in
expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human
peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes.
Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then,
as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her
isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the
stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.
Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and
thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth--where had Lynette seen them
before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into
the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it
up and kissed it soundly.
"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are
mother and nurse?"
"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows,
and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart
squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most
cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and
wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered
no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her
interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and
quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had
arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of
having no other engagement so absorbing.
Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing
guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books
and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from
whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep
side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white
sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon
Saxham's heart so heavily.
No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the
sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of
Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and
propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white
bonnet-strings--a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently
reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed
against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who
carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the
fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at
an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her
plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred
with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in
evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the
farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the
steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation
underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the
suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the
pearl.
Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red
umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible
consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them--cry out....
Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged
ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of
karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it,
standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high
crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow--a squat, blue dwarf with arms
out of all proportion--flourished and gesticulated at her feet.