VII

Miss Latimer did not come to dinner and he was thankful for it, though there was little to be thankful for, he felt, as he sat in the library afterwards and wondered what Tony was thinking of there in the darkness above him, if she were alone and in the dark. The thought that she was not, the thought that Miss Latimer, with her stone-curlew eyes and pallid, brooding face, was with her made him restless. He could not read. He threw his book aside and stared into the fire.

Next morning the rain had ceased and it was cold and sunny. He found Miss Latimer in the dining-room when he went down. She was already dressed for going out and had started her breakfast. "My poor friend in the village is dying," she said, "and has asked for me. I have a message to you from Antonia. She is still resting this morning, but will come down at three, if you will be in the library then."

Her courteous terseness put barriers between them; but none were needed.

He could not have asked questions or appealed this morning. He imagined, though he had looked at his face in the mirror with unregarding eyes, that he, too, was perceptibly aged, and his main feeling about Miss Latimer was that she was old and ugly and that he was sick of her.

After breakfast he went out into the hard, bright air.

He walked about the grounds and found himself looking at the house with consciously appraising eyes, from the lawn, from the ring-court, from the kitchen-garden. It was a solid, tasteful, graceful structure; mild, with its sunny facade looking to the moors; cheerful, with its gable-ends; but as he had felt it at the first he felt it now more decisively as empty of tradition and tenderness. It had remained, too, so singularly new; perhaps because, in its exposed situation, none of the trees carefully disposed about it had yet grown to a proportionate height. Yes, notwithstanding the pa.s.sion and grief now burning within its walls, it was impersonal, unlovable; and it would need centuries, in spite of the care and love lavished upon it, to gain a soul.

He knew, as he walked, that he was taking comfort from these reflections and was vexed that he should need them. He had completely placed, psychologically, if not scientifically, the events of the other evening, and it was not necessary that he should be satisfied that Wyndwards was a place to which the supernatural could not attach itself. Yet that desire, indubitably, directed his wanderings, and he could compute its power by the strength of the reluctance he felt for visiting the flagged garden where, if anywhere, the element he thankfully missed might lurk.

But when, putting an ironic compulsion upon himself, he had entered the little enclosure, his main impression, as before, was one of mere beauty. It was the only corner of Wyndwards that had achieved individuality; the placing of the fountain, the stone bench, the beds among the flags, was a pleasure to the eye. And like a harbinger of good cheer, he heard, from the branches of the budding wood beyond the garden wall, the wiry, swinging notes of a chiff-chaff, and his own soul as well as the flagged garden seemed exorcised by that a.s.sured and reiterated gladness. Ghosts, in a world where chiff-chaffs sang, were irrelevancies, even if they walked. And they did not walk. In sunlight as in moonlight he found the flagged garden empty.

He sat down on the stone bench for a little while and watched the fountain and listened to the chiff-chaff, while he lighted a cigarette and told himself that the day was pleasant. With reiteration the bird's monotonous little utterance lost its special message for him and dropped to an accompaniment to thoughts that, if unhaunted, were not happy, in spite of the pleasant day. He felt that he hated silent, sunny Wyndwards. He cursed the impulse that had brought Antonia there, and him after her. It had seemed at the time the most natural of things that his young widowed friend should ask him to pay her a spring visit in her new home. His courtship of her, laconic, implicit, patient, had prolonged itself through the dreary London winter following the Armistice, and springtime on the moors had seemed full of promise to his hopes. Alas!

why had they not stayed in safe, dear, dingy London, London of tubes and shops and theatres, of people and clever tea- and dinner-tables? There one lived sanely in the world of the normal consciousness, one's personality hedged round by activity and convention from the vagrant and disintegrating influences of the subliminal, or the subconscious, whichever it might have been that had infernally played the trick of the other evening. He sat there, poking with his stick at the crevices between the flags, and the song of the chiff-chaff was his only comfort.

Miss Latimer did not return to lunch, and he was in the library waiting for Tony long before the appointed hour. She came before it struck, softly and suddenly entering, turning without a pause to close the door behind her, not looking at him as she went to the fire and leaned there, her hand upon the mantelpiece. She was dressed in black, a flowing gown with wide sleeves that invested her with an unfamiliar, invalided air; but her hair was beautifully wreathed and she wore her little high-heeled satin shoes, tying about the instep. For a moment she stood looking down into the fire; then, as she raised her face, he saw the change in her.

"Why, Tony," he said gently, "you look very ill."

Her eyes only met his for a moment and, instinctively, he kept the distance they measured.

"I'm not very well," she said. "I haven't been able to sleep. Not for these two nights."

"Not at all?"

"Not at all."

"Don't take drugs," he said after a moment. "Miss Latimer tells me that you take drugs. I didn't know it."

"It's very seldom," she said, with a faint, deprecatory smile. "I'm very careful."

Still he felt that he could not approach her, and it was with a sense of the unmeet, or at all events the irrelevant, that he helplessly fell back on verbal intimacy. "You could, I am sure, sleep in the train to-night; with me to look after you."

She said nothing to this for a moment, but then replied, as though she had really thought it over: "Not to-night; Cicely won't get back in time. Her poor woman is dying; she couldn't leave her. But to-morrow; I intend to go to-morrow; with Cicely."

"Leaving me here?" he enquired, with something of his own dryness, so that, again with the faint, defensive smile, she said: "Oh--you must come with us; we will all go together; as far as London. We are going down to Cornwall, Bevis, to some cousins of Cicely's near Fowey."

He came then, after a little silence, and leaned at the other end of the mantelpiece. "What's the matter, Tony?" he asked. He had not, in his worst imaginings, imagined this. She had never before spoken as though they were, definitely, to go different ways. And she stood looking down into the fire as if she could not meet his eyes. "You see," he said, but he felt it to be useless, "I was right about that wretched table business. It's that that has made you ill."

"Yes; it's because of that," she said.

"You must let me talk to you about it," he went on. "I can explain it all, I think."

"It is explained," she said. Her voice was cold and gentle, cold, it seemed to him, with the immensity of some blank vastness of distance that divided them. And a cold presage fell upon him, of what he could not say; or would not.

"You would not explain it as I would," he said. "You must listen to me and not to Miss Latimer."

"It is all explained, Bevis," she repeated. "It was true. What it said was true."

"How do you mean, true?" he asked, and he heard the presage in his voice.

"He is there," she said, and now he knew why she was far from him, and what the stillness was that wrapped her round. "He comes. Cicely has seen him. She saw him there that night. Beside the fountain."

It was, he saw it now, what he had expected, and his heart stood still to hear it. Then he said: "You mean that she tells you she sees him; that she thinks she sees him; since he's come just as you led her to expect he would, and just where."

She shook her head gently and her downcast face kept its curious, considering look. "It wasn't I, nor you, nor Cicely. He was with us. We could see nothing, you and I. He could not show himself to us; we had put ourselves too far from him. But when we left her alone, Cicely went to the window and saw him standing in the moonlight. He was not looking up at her, but down at the fritillaries. She and he planted them there together, before we were married. And all the while she looked, he stayed there, not moving and plainly visible. I knew it. I knew he was there when I looked, although I could see nothing." She spoke with an astonishing and terrifying calm.

"And she came at once and told you this? That night?"

"Not that night. She went down into the garden. She thought he might speak to her. But he was gone. And when she came back and looked from the window, he was gone. No; it was next morning she told me. She tried not to tell; but I made her."

"Curious," said Bevis after a silence, "that she could have talked to me yesterday afternoon, and given me my tea, as if all this had never happened." But he knew as he spoke that it had not been so with Miss Latimer. Something had happened; he had seen it when she was with him; and he now knew what it had been.

Gibes and scepticism fell as idly upon Antonia as faint rain. She was unaware of them. "No; she would never speak to you about it. There was no surprise in it for her, Bevis. She has always felt him there. When we went to the window she thought that we should surely see him, and when we did not, she pretended to sleep, purposely, so that we should go and leave her to look out. It comforted her to see him. It was only for me she was frightened."

"Yes; I rather suspected that," he muttered. "That she was shamming. I didn't want to leave her there alone."

"You couldn't have kept her from him always, Bevis," Antonia said gently. "If it had not been then, she would have seen him last night, I am sure; because I am sure he intended her to see him, meant and longed for it. But it was only the one time. Last night he was not there."

He left the fire and took a turn or two up and down the room. His thoughts were divided against themselves. Did he feel, now, when, after all, the worst had happened, less fear, or more, than he had felt? Did he believe that Miss Latimer had lied? Did he believe Malcolm had appeared to her? And if Malcolm had, in very truth, appeared, did it make any difference? After all, what difference did it make?

"Tony," he said presently, and really in a tone of ordinary argument, "you say it was only for you she was frightened. What frightened her, for you?"

She thought this over for a little while. "Wasn't it natural?" she said at last. "She knew how I should feel it."

"In what way feel it?"

"She knew that until then I had not really believed him still existing,"

said Antonia, with her cold, downcast face. "Not as she believed it; not even as you did. She knew what it must mean."

"That when you really believed, it must part us?"

"Not only that. Perhaps that, alone, would not have parted us. But that he should come back."

Still she did not look at him, and he continued to limp up and down, his eyes, also, downcast. He, too, was seeing Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain, as he had seen him when first Antonia had told him of her fear. He had visualized her thoughts on that first day; and though, while they sat at the table, he had not remembered Tony's fear, it had doubtless been its doubled image that had printed itself from their minds upon Miss Latimer's clairvoyant brain. But now, seeing his dead friend, as he always thought of him, the whole and happy creature, a painful memory suddenly a.s.sailed him, challenging this peaceful picture of Malcolm's ghost; and he was aware, as it came, as he dwelt on it, of a stir of hope, a tightening of craft, in his veins and along his nerves. Subtlety, after all, might serve better than flesh and blood.

This, he was sure, was a memory not till then recalled at Wyndwards; and it might strangely help him.

"Tony, how was Malcolm dressed when she saw him?" he asked.

"In his uniform." He had avoided looking at her in asking his question, but he heard from her voice that she suspected nothing. "As he must have been when he was killed."

As he must have been when he was killed. Tony had played into his hands.

"Bareheaded, or with his cap?"