Part 2

He had held her more tightly, drawn her more near, and now, his haggard young face lighted with the sudden ardour of his conviction, he saw his light flash back to him from her, so that dropping his hands from her arms, he seized her, drew her down to him, enfolded her, and, feeling her yield, kissed her again and again.

"Bevis!" she whispered, amazed, aghast, yet, in her yielding, confessing everything.

When she drew herself away and stood up beside him, it was blindly, putting her hand out for the table, her face averted; and so she stood for a moment, while he saw that the colour bathed her face and neck. Then he saw that the tears rained down. He had, strangely, never seen her cry before, though he had seen her at the earlier moments of her great grief. She had been frozen, gaunt, lost, then.

"Darling Tony--forgive me."

"Oh," she wept, "it's not your fault!"

"Yes, it is. Don't ask me to regret it; but it is."

"No; no. It's not your fault," she repeated. And she began to move away, blindly.

"Tell me you forgive me." He had drawn himself up in his chair and looked after her.

"Of course I forgive you. I can't forgive myself."

"That's just as bad. Must you go?"

"I must. I must. Later--we'll talk. I'll try to think. I'll try to understand. I'll try to explain everything."

She had got herself to the door and she had not turned her face to him again. "Don't despise me," she said as she left him.

II

Though the traces of her tears were still visible, Antonia met him at lunch with composure. Like all the rooms at Wyndwards, the dining-room was too accurate and intended and, darkly panelled as it was, the low mullioned windows looking out on the high ring-court, it had, through some miscalculation in the lighting, an uncomfortably sombre air. They sat there, the three of them, around the polished table, with its embroidered linens, its crystal and silver, highly civilized and modern in the highly civilized and modern room. He and Antonia, at all events, were that. Miss Latimer, perhaps, belonged to a more primitive tradition. It struck him that he would have liked Wyndwards better if it had kept to that tradition; the tradition, in fact, of making no attempts. As it was, it didn't match Miss Latimer, nor, though modern and civilized, did it match him and Tony. It was neither sceptical nor sophisticated, nor indifferent.

Antonia leaned her elbow on the table while she ate and looked out at the ring-court. Miss Latimer stooped, but did not lounge. She still wore her hat and ate in a business-like manner, throwing from time to time a bit of bread or biscuit to the dogs. The task of talking to her fell entirely upon him, for Antonia, though composed, was evidently in no mood for talking. He asked her questions about the country and its birds, beasts, and flowers, and she answered, if not affably, yet with an accuracy that betrayed a community of taste.

She told him that they were rather too far north to get stone-curlews, as he had hoped they might. "I found a nest once," she said: "but that was when I was staying with some people ten miles away."

"What luck! Did you see the birds?"

"Yes. I hid near by for some hours and saw them going to and fro. I could have photographed them if I had had a camera."

"What luck!" Captain Saltonhall repeated, with sincerity. "I've only once had a glimpse of one, flying. Queer, watchful, uncanny creatures, aren't they, with great, clear eyes."

"They are rather strange-looking birds."

It struck him suddenly that Miss Latimer herself looked like a stone-curlew.

"They've the same cry, nearly, as the ordinary curlew, haven't they?" he continued. "You get plenty of those up here, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes. You can hear them any day. It is rather the same sort of cry."

Antonia knew little about the country and was not observant of nature; but now, leaning her head on her hand and looking out of the window, she remarked, unexpectedly: "I hate their cry; if it is the cry of curlews I mean. Aren't they the birds that have that high, bleak, drifting wail?"

"Oh, I rather like it," said Captain Saltonhall. "Yes, that's the bird. It's the sort of melancholy ordained by Providence to go with tea-time and a wood-fire, as eggs are ordained to go with bacon."

"No," said Antonia. "It's ordained to go with nothing. It makes me think of something that has been forgotten; something that has given up even the hope of being remembered, yet that laments."

"But the curlew isn't forgotten. It is probably calling to its mate."

"Probably. I am not talking of the natural history of the bird. Its cry sounds like the cry of a creature that has been forgotten by its mate."

"What do you think it sounds like?" he asked Miss Latimer. He distrusted the direction taken by Antonia's thoughts.

And, looking before her, seeming not to follow their definitions, she answered coldly:

"I think Antonia describes it very beautifully."

After lunch Antonia said that Miss Latimer must show them the garden. He saw that she intended to keep this companion near them and would not, for the present, be alone with him.

In the flagged hall, wide and light, there were oaken chests and tables and large framed engravings of cathedrals. Antonia selected a sunshade from the stand. None were black; they were all pre-war sunshades, and the one she found made her lovely head, when they went out into the sunlight, seem still paler and darker against its faded poppy-red.

She led them first into the little walled garden of her fears. One stepped out into it from a door in the hall, and, wondering if she had put a wholesome compulsion upon herself, he expressed an indirect approval of her good sense by pausing to look about him and to say, "How delightfully planned this is."

He had never seen so many white fritillaries growing together; their jade green and alabaster white, rising from narrow beds among the flags, seemed like another expression of the stone. The fountain was musical, and the stone bench under the great cedar invited to poetical reverie. "That cedar is the oldest thing here, isn't it?" he asked.

Antonia stood, gently turning the handle of the sunshade on her shoulder, and she, too, looked about her, her eyes meeting his for a moment as if, with a grateful humour, acknowledging his approbation. "I'm not quite as foolish as you may think," they told him.

"It's the only old thing in the place," she said--"except for the bits of ruin in the garden walls. There was a border castle here, long ago, and the cedar must have belonged to its later days. I'm glad it's all so new, aren't you? I don't like old places. Not to live in."

It was, perhaps, only as looked down at from the third window that the flagged garden had its uncanniness for her. She seemed quite content to stand there in the sunlight and admire it with him. Any distaste or reluctance was Miss Latimer's, and he did not know why it was that he divined it beneath her air of detachment. It was she who, presently, moved away, passing out into the high-walled kitchen garden, and they followed her.

There were cordon fruit-trees round the vegetable-beds, and daffodils, at one end, grew thickly against the walls. Wide, herbaceous borders ran on either side of the central path, showing already their clumps and bosses of green and bronze.

"Cicely plans it all, you know," said Antonia, going now before them, "and does heaps of the work herself, with spade and fork. Mrs. Wellwood had only the one gardener and a boy. I can't think how Cicely contrives to keep it all so beautifully."

"It was Mrs. Wellwood who planned it all," said Miss Latimer. But she could not disown the work.

He was seeing her more and more clearly as one of those curious beings whose personalities are parasitic on a place. He doubted whether her thoughts ever wandered beyond Wyndwards. All her activities, certainly, were conditioned by it. It would not be only that she dug and planted, hoed and watered, mulched and staked and raked in the garden. He felt sure, too, acute young man that he was, that she cut out the loose chintz covers for the furniture, superintended the making of marmalade in spring and jam in summer, kept a careful eye on the store-cupboard and washed the dogs with her own hands. There were two dogs: an old Dandie Dinmont and a young fox-terrier; and he had, all the while they walked, a feeling, not a bit ghostly, amusing rather than sad, that they were bits of Malcolm's soul, detached bits, remaining on earth behind him; the Dandie Dinmont the soul of his happy boyhood at Wyndwards and the fox-terrier the soul of his maturity. Miss Latimer would find in tending them the same passionate satisfaction she had in all of it; the place, and the persons it still embodied for her and who for her survived in it, indistinguishably mingled. All of it was her life and she could imagine no other.

Antonia would never be that sort of woman. Places, if not parasitic upon her, at least were mere settings and backgrounds. She made the silvery forms of the distant hills subservient to her beauty as, with the faded silken sunshade, she drifted before them along the paths. She wore still, rather absurdly, though the day was so fine and the paths so dry, her little black satin house-shoes, high-heeled and laced about the ankle with satin ribbon; and as she walked she cast her admiring, unobservant glances to right and left or stooped now and then to pat the dogs. The dogs were very fond of her, racing forward and then returning to look up at her with interrogative delight. That, too, made him think of Malcolm. They were much fonder of Tony than of Miss Latimer, to whom they owed so much.

It was he who had to do all the talking to Miss Latimer, and it was difficult to talk to her and to express his accurate appreciation of her gardening exploits, or his admiration of the changing views of the house that their walk disclosed, since, in answering him, it was always as if she avoided some attempt at intimacy and as if he could make no reference to the place without being too personal. This was especially funny since, behind his praise, was the judgment that what the place lacked was personality; and he hadn't the faintest wish to be intimate with Miss Latimer.

It was not until after tea that he again found himself alone with Antonia. They were in the drawing-room, the tea-table had been taken away, the lamps lighted, and Antonia was embroidering before the fire.

"Would she hate me if I ever did come to marry you?" he asked. He asked it without seeming to recall the morning and its avowal.

Antonia, following his advice, was selecting a shade of azalea-green to lay against her pearly grey. She had always asked his advice about such matters, and the cushions and firescreens in her London house recalled to him how many summer afternoons before the war when, on week-ends in the country, she had held up her work to ask, "_Is_ that right, Bevis?" while Malcolm smoked beside them, amused by their preoccupation over the alternative of pink or orange.

"Cicely, you mean?" Antonia asked.

"Yes. Would she resent it? Would she hate me for it?--and you?"

Antonia considered, and he knew while she considered, her eyes on the azalea silk, that he filled her again with deep delight. He and his passion were there, encompassing, yet not pursuing her. She gave nothing and betrayed nothing and she was secure of all.

"I don't think she could hate me. That sounds fatuous; but I believe it's true. I don't know about you. But no; I don't think she'd resent it. Why should she?"

"Well, caring for him so much and seeing me here in his place."

"How brave you are, Bevis," said Antonia after a moment, drawing out her silk. It was the quality in him to which she most often reverted.

"Am I? Why?"

"You are not afraid to remind me."

"Why should I be afraid? I know your thoughts. But I'm not going to talk about them, or about mine. I want you to explain Miss Latimer."

"There's not much to explain. She shows it all, I think. She's deep and narrow and simple. You don't like her. I can see that."

"I can't imagine how. I'm constantly making myself agreeable."

"To me; not to her. She knows as well as I do why you take trouble over her. Not that I blame you. I didn't think I should like her when I first saw her. And then I came to find that I did; more and more; very, very much. Or, perhaps, it is trust, rather than liking," Antonia mused. "Poor little Cicely. Do you know, I don't think any one has ever really liked her much. Not old Mrs. Wellwood, really, nor even Malcolm. It hurt me to feel, in a moment, that Mrs. Wellwood liked even me, whom she hardly knew, better."

"I am not surprised," Captain Saltonhall commented.

"No; but that's not relevant, Bevis; because one doesn't expect one's mother-in-law to like one, however charming one may be. What I felt about it was that Cicely had starved her, just as she starved Cicely. Neither could give the other anything except absolute trust. Cicely was the fonder, I think, for old Mrs. Wellwood was cold as well as shy, cold to every one but Malcolm; even with me she was cold; and even with Malcolm she was, always, shy."

"Dismal it sounds, for all of them."

"No; it wasn't that. Cheerful and serene rather. But all the same Cicely is pathetic. And the more I think of her, the more I admire her. She's so individual, yet so impersonal, if one can make the distinction. There's no appeal of any sort; no demand. She never seems to need anything or to ask anything; perhaps that is why she doesn't gain devotion; the more self-absorbed and demanding people are, the more devotion they get, I'm afraid. At all events, she's absolutely devoted; absolutely selfless and straight."

"What did they do with themselves, she and Mrs. Wellwood, when Malcolm wasn't here to give them an object? I never saw his mother. He said she hated coming to town."

"Oh, it was miserable to see them in town, as I did once; forlorn, caged birds. Malcolm was their object, you see, even when he wasn't here. And they lived together just as Cicely lives now alone. There are country neighbours--Mrs. Wellwood was scrupulously sociable--and the village, and the garden. Cicely still goes to read to old bed-ridden women and to take them soup. I thought, in my London ignorance, that the lady-bountiful was a figure of fun to every one nowadays, flouted from the cottage door, and all the rest of it. But I've found out that there's nothing the cottage really loves so well. Independence and committees bore them dreadfully; they have all that here; there's an energetic vicar's wife, and she got even poor Mrs. Wellwood on her committee; it bores the village people, but it frightened her. Cicely never would. I can't imagine Cicely on a committee. She'd have nothing to say, though it wouldn't frighten her."

He had always savoured Antonia's vagrant impressionism. "Did they read?" he asked.

"I should rather think so!" she laughed a little. "They were great on reading. All the biographies in two volumes and all the travels, and French _mémoires_--translated and expurgated. Cicely has the most ingenuous ideas about the court of Louis the Fourteenth. Novels, too; but they contrived always to miss the good ones. I don't suppose they ever attempted a Henry James or heard of Anatole France."

"And never danced a tango, _à plus forte raison_, or saw a Russian ballet."

"They did see a Russian ballet, that once they were up. Malcolm and I took them. I think it bewildered Mrs. Wellwood, and Cicely was very dry about it. And they saw me dance the tango; I did it for them, here," said Antonia, and involuntarily she sighed, although she did not look up at her companion. She and Bevis, adepts of the dance, had, before the war, danced together continually. "They liked seeing me do it," she said. "They liked my differences and what they felt to be my audacities. But they'd have liked anything Malcolm did." And then she came back to his first question. "As far as that goes, my remarrying, if I ever did, as long as it wasn't too quickly, and some one Malcolm liked, I don't for a moment think she'd mind."

Captain Saltonhall did not agree with her, but he did not say so. They talked, thus, very pleasantly, till the hour for dressing, and after dinner Antonia sang to him and Miss Latimer. "What shall it be, Cicely?" she asked, and Miss Latimer said, "The old favourites, please." So that Captain Saltonhall, who had only heard her sing Brahms, Duparc, and Debussy, heard now old English folk-songs and "Better lo'ed you could na' be." She had a melancholy, sweet, imperfect voice, and though her singing had magic it was the flutelike, expressionless magic of the wood-land. She sang indolently, like a blackbird, and the current of the song carried her. But it was a voice that moved him more than any other voice he knew, and as he sat, impassive, apparently, his hands clasped round his knee, he felt the tears, again and again, rising to his eyes.

Miss Latimer sat staring into the fire. She was dry-eyed. But he felt sure that she, too, was only apparently impassive. He felt sure that these songs had been Malcolm's favourites, too.

III

They were sitting next day in a sunny hollow of the moors. Above their heads the spring air was chill, and as they had walked they had felt the wind; but, sunken in this little, sheltered cup, summer was almost with them and the grass and heather exhaled a summer fragrance. Bevis had insisted on the walk, saying that he could manage it perfectly, and indeed they were half a mile from the house before he had owned that they had gone far enough for his strength; a little too far, he was aware, as they sank down on the grass, and he was sorry, for he knew from Antonia's face that she was going to talk to him and that all his strength and resource would not be too much for the interview.

"I've been thinking, Bevis," she began at once, sitting a little below him, her hands clasped round her knees. "I want to tell you everything. In the first place, let me be quite straight. I do love you," she said, without looking round at him. "I am in love with you."

"Yes," he assented.

"What happened yesterday morning couldn't have happened had I not been," she defined for herself. "Not that I mean it exonerates me."

"Or me?"

"You don't need exoneration. You are not unfaithful."

"No, I'm not unfaithful; and I don't think you are. But go on."

She paused for a moment as though his assurance hurt rather than helped her. "That is what it all comes back to, for me, Bevis. Am I unfaithful? If Malcolm were alive, I should be."

"If Malcolm were alive, you wouldn't be in love with me," he set her straight.

"I'm so glad you see that and believe it," she murmured, while he saw the slow flush in her cheek. "That's one of the things I most wanted to make clear."

"You had no need to, my dear girl. I know how it was with you and Malcolm."

"You know. You remember. Yes." She drew a deep breath. He had comforted her. "So, you see, I'm only in love with you because he isn't here any longer. If he were here, I couldn't love any one but him." She stopped for a moment. "Bevis, that is what it comes to. Is he here?"

"Here? How do you mean?" the young man asked.

"Are we immortal? Do we survive death? Does Malcolm, somewhere, still love me?" She kept her face turned from him and he was aware that he felt her questions irrelevant and that this was wrong of him or perhaps came of his being tired. Or perhaps it came from the fact that the soft edges and tips of Antonia's averted profile, soft yet so clear, shadowed yet so pale, against the sky, were more relevant than any such questions. He looked away from her, calling himself to order, and then, in a different voice, for though he still felt her questions irrelevant, he was able to think of them, he said, "I see."

What he seemed first to see was himself as he had been not many years ago, a youth in his rooms at Oxford. Books piled beside him, a pipe between his teeth, he saw himself staring into the fire, while, in a sad yet pleasant perplexity, he had brooded on such questions. Body and soul; appearance and reality; the temporal and the eternal consciousness;--the old words chimed in his brain. Then came a swift memory of Antonia and himself dancing the tango in London, and then the memory of the dead face of a little French _poilu_ he had come upon one evening in France, by the roadside, a face sweet and childlike. How many dead faces he had seen since he had danced the tango with Antonia, and how wraith-like, beside the agonies he had since passed through, were the mental disciplines and distractions of his studious youth! Yet it all held together. It was because of the agonies that the answers had come.

Antonia's voice broke in upon his reverie and his eyes were brought back to her. "Help me, Bevis," she said.

Something in that made him dimly smile. "Help you in what way, my dear girl? Which do you want most--to have me and to believe that Malcolm doesn't exist any longer; or to believe him immortal and to lose me?" He had not meant to be cruel; he was placing the dilemma before himself as well as her; but he saw he had been, when her slow, helpless gaze of pain turned upon him and her eyes filled with tears.

"Why do you always show me that I must despise myself?" she said. "How can I know what I want?"

"Dear Tony," he said gently, "what you want, what you really want, is me. And I don't despise you for that."

"Oh--it's not so simple, Bevis;--oh, it's not! I want you; but if he were here I'd go to him and leave you without a pang."

"No, you wouldn't," he smiled grimly. "You'd leave me, of course, because he has been far more in your life than I have;--and he is your husband. But it wouldn't be without a pang."

"With a pang, then," she was brave and faced it. "But that would pass when I had told him everything and been forgiven. Malcolm, I know, would forgive me."

"I should rather say he would!" Still the young man laughed a little grimly. "Why shouldn't he? If a man returns from the dead, he must expect to find that the world has gone on without him, mustn't he? After all, Tony dear, Malcolm hasn't merely gone to Australia or Patagonia; he's dead; and that does make a difference."

She was the most generous and unresentful of creatures. A warm flood of recognition filled him as he saw how he still hurt her and how she took it. And he was harsh and crabbed. He had always had an ironic tongue and an ironic eye for reality, in himself and in others. And now, entangled in his own passion and in the webs of her dreams and difficulties, he recognized something perfidious in his nature, something that, while it adored her, yet found pleasure, or relief, in dealing her now and then, as a punishment for what she made him suffer, the light lash of his unentangled and passionless perception. And who was he to lash Tony?

"Forgive me," he said, leaning over and looking down at her. "I am a brute, as I told you. Why am I not more merely grateful to you for loving any one so useless? I'll help you in any way I can, Tony. What do you really want to ask me? Perhaps what makes me so odious to you is that I've got no help for you."

Perhaps it was. A shrinking from the issue she put before him had been in him from the first.

And poor Tony did not suspect what he meant; did not, for all her attempt at clearness, see in what way she really wanted him to help her.

"Please, please do," she said. "Try to be gentle and to understand. I'll go by what you say. So there it is: Do _you_ believe in immortality, Bevis?"