Part 24 (1/2)

”Of course.”

”Why would this knight”--and she placed her hand on the marble face, ”have said that he must kill another who had stolen his wife, say, to avenge his 'honour'?”

”That is the conventional part of it--what Stepan calls the grafting on of a meaning to suit some idea of civilisation. It was a nice way of having personal revenges too and teaching people that they could not steal anything with impunity. If we a.n.a.lysed that kind of honour we would find it was princ.i.p.ally vanity. The dishonour really lay with the wife, if she deceived her husband--and with the other man if he was the husband's friend--if he was not, his abduction of the woman was not 'dishonourable' because he was not trusted, it was merely an act of theft.”

”What then must we do when we are very strongly tempted?” Her voice was so low he could hardly hear it.

”It is sometimes wisest to run away,” and he turned from her and moved towards the door.

She followed wondering. She knew not why she had promoted this discussion. She felt that she had been very unbalanced all the day.

They went back to the house almost silently and through the green drawing-room window again and up the broad stairs with Sir William Hamilton's huge decorative painting of an Ardayre group of his time, filling one vast wall at the turn.

And so they reached the cedar parlour, and found coffee waiting and cigarettes.

There was a growing tension between them and each guessed that the other was not calm. Amaryllis began showing him the view from the windows across the park, and then the old fireplace and panelling of the room.

”We sit here generally when we are alone,” she said. ”I like it the best of all the rooms in the house.”

”It is a fitting frame for you.”

They lit cigarettes.

Denzil had many things he longed to say to her of the place, and the thoughts it called up in him--but he checked himself. The thing was to get through with it all quickly and to be gone. They went into the picture gallery then, and began from the end, and when they came to the Elizabethan Denzil they paused for a little while. The painted likeness was extraordinary to the living splendid namesake who gazed up at the old panel with such interested eyes.

And Amaryllis was thinking:

”If only John had that something in him which these two have in their eyes, how happy we could be.”

And Denzil was thinking:

”I hope the child will reproduce the type.” He felt it would be some kind of satisfaction to himself if she should have a son which should be his own image.

”It is so strange,” she remarked, ”that you should be exactly like this Denzil, and yet resemble John who does not remind me of him at all, except in the general family look which every one of them share. This one might have been painted from you.”

He looked down at her suddenly and he was unable to control the pa.s.sionate emotion in his eyes. He was thinking that yes, certainly, the child must be like him--and then what message would it convey to her?

Amaryllis was disturbed, she longed to ask him what it was which she felt, and why there seemed some illusive remembrance always haunting her.

She grew confused, and they pa.s.sed on to another frame which contained the Lady Amaryllis who had had the sonnets written to her nut brown locks. She was a dainty creature in her stiff farthingale, but bore no likeness to the present mistress of Ardayre.

Denzil examined her for some seconds, and then he said reflectively:

”She is a Sweetheart--but she is not you!”

There was some tone of tenderness in his voice when he said the word ”Sweetheart” and Amaryllis started and drew in her breath. It recalled something which had given her joy, a low murmur whispered in the night.

”Sweetheart!”--a word which John, alas! had never used before nor since, except in that one letter in answer to her cry of exaltation--her glad Magnificat. What was this echo sounding in her ears? How like Denzil's voice was to John's--only a little deeper. Why, why should he have used that word ”Sweetheart”?

No coherent thought had yet come to her, it was as though she had looked for an instant upon some scene which awakened a chord of memory, and then that the curtain had dropped before she could define it.