“I have outstayed all the rest,” Lindsay said, with his hat and stick
in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, “because I want
particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time,” he
added, glancing at his watch.
She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour for
men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when
he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while
Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in
her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries--it
did not in the least obscure what she found to say--and in the midst of
it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to
his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke
of out-sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and
open it. “You might stay to lunch,” she said, addressing a pair of crows
in altercation on the verandah.
“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said. “Can I convince
you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute fool?”
Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of
the need of support. “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath
with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take
so long.” She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his
buttonhole.
“I've had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely.
I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly,
watching her face; “so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it roughly.”
She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. “Why should
you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which
cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the
brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it. He knew
her so well.
“A great many people will,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of their
fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you.”
She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked
straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in
the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.
“I believe you know already,” Lindsay cried.
“I have heard something. Don't be alarmed--not from people, from Miss
Howe.”
“Wonderful woman! I haven't told her.”
“Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case,” Alicia
went on, with immense courage, “I didn't believe them.”
“Why?” he asked enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight--he would
even submit it to analysis.
She hesitated--her business was in great waters, the next instant might
engulf her. “It's so curiously unlike you,” she faltered. “If she
had been a duchess--a very exquisite person, or somebody very
clever--remember I haven't seen her.”
“You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons.” Lindsay
visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.
Alicia raised her eyebrows.
“What do you expect one to imagine?” she asked, with quietness.
“A miracle,” he said sombrely.
“Ah, that's difficult!”
There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely--
“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”
Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed
to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running
watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she
seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she
could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he
stood.
“Don't make a mistake,” she said. “Don't.” She thrust her hand for
a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it,
gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. “That's what everybody
will tell me; but I thought you might understand.” He tapped the toe of
his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down
and counted them too.
“Then you won't help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.
“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring. “Ask somebody else.”
“Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as
my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good
you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid
colours of the lost.”
The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and
the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting
Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise
of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she
looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more
unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.
“No,” she said. “It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become
involved--I might do harm.” She had surmounted her emotion; she was able
to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. “I should
do harm,” she repeated.
“You don't count with her effect on you.”
“You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man.”
“But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm really
not a fool--not even very impressionable?”
“Oh no!” she said impatiently. “No--of course not.”
“Pray why?”
“There are other things to reckon with.” She looked coldly beyond him
out of the window. “A man's intelligence when he is in love--how far can
one count on it?”
There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured, “Oh, I
don't agree,” with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a
simple appeal. “Then after all,” he said, “you're not my friend.”
It goaded her into something like an impertinence. “After you have
married her,” she said, “you'll see.”
“You will be hers then,” he declared.
“I will be yours.” Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a
brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
“And I thought you broad in these views,” Lindsay said, glancing at her
curiously. Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a heavy step in
the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon Major Livingstone,
looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a
profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin,
though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear
it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his
perturbation away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud
upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling
to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence
on the other side of the door.